Practice Makes Perfect Spanish Problem Solver by Eric W. Vogt

Author:Eric W. Vogt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education
Published: 2012-04-12T04:00:00+00:00

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Using verbs to show politeness

I’m sure you’ve learned to say por favor. This expression is generally sufficient to show courtesy to your listener, but it isn’t the only means to indicate various degrees of earnestness when making a request. Compared with Spanish, English is relatively poor in terms of verbs or phrases for expressing politeness without seeming sarcastic. The word please is pretty much all that English speakers have at hand to verbally express politeness without adding verbiage that makes the speaker seem “over the top.”

The use of deber, querer, and poder as helping verbs is progressively more polite in the present, conditional, and imperfect subjunctive. While they convey no difference in meaning, they display a great difference in tone for indicating three degrees, or gradations, of politeness in Spanish. In other words, the increasing gradations of politeness are shown by means of the tenses and moods used. Learning the forms in this chapter will place you beyond the bare territory of por favor and show that you are more socially functional than those who cannot manage these forms properly.

Like all helping verbs, these three verbs are used to introduce an infinitive (without any preposition between them). It is worth noticing that they have to do with the three aspects of the human mind: poder shows ability, capacity, or power (can, could): querer expresses volition or the will (want or desire); and deber indicates a moral obligation (ought, should, and owe).

Other auxiliary verbs or verb phrases that indicate moral obligation or necessity cannot be used as deber is to express degrees of politeness. The moral obligation expressed by deber is not as strong as that conveyed by tener que + infinitive, necesitar + infinitive, or the impersonal hay que + infinitive. Thus, unlike what many dictionaries indicate, deber is not the best translation for must, when must really means business.

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