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Capítulo 2: Marketing

2.10: Gramática: pronombres relativos

¿Que o quien?

A relative pronoun exists to provide additional information about a noun or pronoun previously mentioned in a sentence. You need relative pronouns in order to make longer sentences, especially ones that contain extra description. In this section, we’ll look at 2 relative pronouns: que & quien.  There are more, but these are some common ones to start with.

The English equivalents of these pronouns are que =t hat, quien = who. One of the interesting things that we’ll see, however, is that while in English we use the relative pronoun who often to talk about people, in Spanish, que is actually used more commonly to talk about people. The following table contains lists of what each pronoun can be used to refer to.

Que Quien(es)
Person

Animal

Thing

Concept

 Person
As you can see, people are listed under both que and quien. So how do you choose which one to use?
Quien can only be used in certain grammatical situations.  Quien either follows a preposition or follows a comma. If there’s no preposition and no comma, there is no way to use quien, and we have to use que. The following list of questions can be useful when determining which one to use:
  1. ¿El pronombre se refiere a una persona?
    1. No = que
    2. Sí = haz la siguiente pregunta: ¿preposición o coma?
      1. Sí = quien
      2. No = que

Examples from our texts:

Here are a few examples of how to use que from recent texts

  1. Existen tácticas y elementos que hay que tener en cuenta a la hora de posicionarnos. (7P del marketing)
  2. El lugar en que se emplaza el producto es clave (7P del marketing)
  3. El posicionamiento de una marca se revela en sus acciones, en la gente que contrata, en los productos y servicios que proporciona, en los precios de sus productos y servicios, en los descuentos que aplica, en el lugar y las promociones que elige para darse a conocer y en los procesos que pone en práctica. (7P del marketing)

The final example shows the importance of positioning. When the rules say that a relative pronoun must follow a preposition or a comma, it means it has to happen immediately after.  There are many commas in that sentence but the word que doesn’t occur right after any of them, so even when that sentence refers to a person, the only option was to use the word que.

When you do want to use quien, remember that it does have number agreement. So it would look like this in a sentence:

Marisa es la mujer con quien hablé ayer.

Matilde y Constanza son las chicas con quienes hablé ayer.

Although in both cases, it is perfectly grammatical to use que instead!

 

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