Mexican Spanish - Syntax

Syntax

Some syntactic patterns that sound very "non-standard" to the Peninsular ear are routine in Mexican Spanish. First and foremost is the more or less conventionalized ellipsis of the negative particle "no" in clauses containing the preposition "hasta" (until):

• Hasta que tomé la píldora se me quitó el dolor. ('Until I took the pill, the pain did not go away.')

In this case, the sentence has the sense indicated by the English translation only if the main verb is implicitly understood as being negated.

A departure from Peninsular usage (which Mexico shares with many other areas of Spanish America) involves using interrogative "qué" in conjunction with the quantifier "tan(to)" ("Qué tan" "Qué tanto" = How):

• ¿Qué tan graves son los daños? (How serious are the damages?) (Whereas in Spain the question would be posed as "¿Hay muchos daños?") (Is there a lot of damage?)
• ¿Qué tan buen cocinero eres? (How good a cook are you?) (Whereas in Spain the question would be posed as "¿Eres buen cocinero?") (Are you a good cook?)

Note that phenomena relating to bilingualism are likely to be encountered among bilinguals whose primary language is not Spanish or in isolated rural regions where the syntactic influence of indigenous languages has been important historically. One of the most discussed of these phenomena is the redundant use of verbal clitics, particularly "lo", a tendency that is encountered in language contact areas throughout Latin America.

Another departure from Peninsular Spanish is that of the preference for the use of the preposition "por" instead of "durante", that in Mexico, as well as in some other regions of the Spanish Americas, is commonly used to convey a time duration or span. For example, whereas in Peninsular Spanish using "por" in a sentence such as Fue el presidente de la compañía por veinte años (He was the president of the company for twenty years) would sound odd and even incorrect—the preferred sentence being in that case Fue el presidente de la compañía durante veinte años—that use of "por" is widespread in Mexican Spanish, to the point that "durante" is quite uncommonly used.

A new way of talking, influenced by the way people from the State of Mexico ask questions, is present more or less recently in central Mexico. Whereas in Mexico city people used to ask: ¿Quieres...? (Would you like...?) nowadays, due to such (negative) influence, tends to ask: ¿No quieres...? (Wouldn't you like...?)