Preview
Here’s a preview of the phrases you’ll be learning in this lesson.
Vocabulary Exercises
Phrase Exercises
The exercises in this lesson use only the informal mode of address.
Pronouns
In this lesson you learnt some new pronouns, known as indirect object clitic pronouns. In order to explain what these are and how they are used, we first need to explain about direct and indirect objects.
In English …
Let’s take the example sentence Mario gives an apple to Lucia. This sentence has a subject, Mario, a verb, gives, a direct object, an apple, and an indirect object, Lucia. In a typical sentence, like the previous one, the subject comes before the verb, the direct object comes after the verb and the indirect object, if present, is introduced by a preposition such as to or for. Alternatively, in English, the indirect object can sometimes be placed before the direct object, in which case the preposition is not needed (Mario gives Lucia an apple).
Any of the nouns in this sentence can be replaced by a pronoun. We can replace the subject with a subject pronoun (He gives an apple to Lucia). We can replace either the direct object or indirect object with an object pronoun (Mario gives it to Lucia or Mario gives an apple to her).
In Italian …
In Italian the situation is similar but not identical. This time we’ll start with the Italian version of the previous example sentence: Mario dà una mela a Lucia. If we don’t want an explicit subject then we can just leave out the subject altogether - we don’t need to replace it with a pronoun (Dà una mela a Lucia, He gives an apple to Lucia). This works because the verb itself (dà) already includes the notion of he or she.
Now when it comes to the direct object and indirect object, Italian actually has two different sets of clitic pronouns to choose from. We can replace the direct object with a direct object clitic pronoun (Mario la dà a Lucia, Mario gives it to Lucia). Or we can replace the indirect object with an indirect object clitic pronoun, in which case we don’t need a preposition (Mario le dà una mela, Mario gives an apple to her or Mario gives her an apple).
The following table shows all the pronouns you’ve encountered so far, which includes both direct object and indirect object clitic pronouns.
| Direct | | Indirect | |
|---|
| mi | me | mi | to me, for me |
| ti | you (informal) | ti | to you (informal), for you (informal) |
| lo | him, it (masc.) | gli | to him, for him, to it (masc.), for it (masc.) |
| la | her, it (fem.), you (formal) | le | to her, for her, to it (fem.), for it (fem.), to you (formal), for you (formal) |
| ci | us | ci | to us, for us |
| li | them (masc.) | gli | to them, for them (masc. or fem.) |
| le | them (fem.) | | |
Note that many of the pronouns (mi, ti, ci, le, gli) appear in more than one place in the previous table. For these pronouns context is particularly important for working out the correct meaning. For example in the sentence Mario le dà una mela, the pronoun le must be the indirect object pronoun meaning to her, rather than the direct object pronoun meaning them, because the sentence already has a direct object: una mela.
Position of clitic pronouns
The rules governing the position of clitic pronouns, covered in Grammar 8, apply equally to the pronouns introduced in this lesson.
Next Lesson: Grammar 15
