Spanish: An Essential Grammar

Use of que after a preposition

Commonly in the case of en, and to a lesser extent with a, conand de, it

is possible to have a preposition directly followed by que:

Es una obra de teatro en que nadie tiene un papel agradable.

It’s a play in which nobody has a nice role.

Esta es la casa con que llevaban tanto tiempo soñando.

This is the house they had been dreaming of for so long.

However, the safest option, in the Peninsula at least, is almost always to

use the el queseries.

One case in which this practice should not be adopted is after nouns

denoting periods of time (e.g. vez‘time’, día‘day’, año‘year’). In this case,

enfollowed directly by queor, more colloquially, just quewill suffice:

La primera vez que la vi fue el verano pasado.

The first time I saw her was last summer.

el día (en) que nació Luis

the day Luis was born

Focusing on words or phrases

English is able to focus on part of a sentence with phrases such as ‘it was John

who.. .’, ‘it was in Segovia/June that.. .’. These are called ‘cleft’ sentences.

The effect of an English cleft sentence can be achieved in Spanish through

the use of the relative pronoun quien/quienesand those in the el que series,

or through the relative adverbs donde, cuandoand como.

Essentially, while English says, for example, ‘it was John who did it’,

Spanish says ‘the one who (el que) did it was John’:

El que lo hizo fue Juan. The one who did it was Juan.

Frequently, however, the verb seris moved to the beginning of the sentence

and the el quephrase is moved to the end, thereby masking the real struc-

ture of the sentence:

Fue Juan el que lo hizo. It was Juan who did it.

Note also that the pronoun quien/quienesis used identically to el quein

this construction:

Fue Juan quien lo hizo. It was Juan who did it.

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Relative
clauses

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