I recently ran into a sentence with one conjugated verb and two infinitives.
Ouch!
But seriously…it was a sentence like Quiero poder hablarlo ‘I want to be able to speak it’, where ‘it’ referred to, perhaps, the Spanish language. I don’t remember whether this sentence came up in a student’s paper or was just something I was working out in my head. At any rate, I was curious to find out how many possible positions there were for the lo pronoun in this sentence.
As all of you know if you’ve tangled with Spanish grammar, an object pronoun like lo can come either before a conjugated verb or after an infinitive. (These are the main two rules, though there are others.) So in a sentence with two verbs, of which the first is conjugated, the pronoun can either precede the first (Lo quiero hablar) or follow the second (Quiero hablarlo). Both are equally valid, and Spanish speakers freely alternate between them.
I wondered: in a sentence with one conjugated verb and two infinitives, are there three possible pronoun positions?
- Lo quiero poder hablar
- Quiero poderlo hablar
- Quiero poder hablarlo
I posed this question on two of my favorite forums, /r/Spanish and WordReference, and the answer was a resounding Sí: all three positions are legitimate.
How cool is that?