Professor Dave again, let’s talk more pronouns.
It’s time to learn another pronoun, the pronoun “ci”.
To be clear, this has the same spelling as the pronoun we saw in our direct and indirect
object pronouns as well as reflexive pronouns lessons, but it is not the same.
Let’s recall a few clauses.
Now we want to learn another usage of ci, which is closer to something we went over
quite a bit earlier in the series, when we learned how to say:
Here, ci has been shortened to C with an apostrophe because the following verb starts with a vowel.
Ci remains intact, because the verb starts with a consonant.
In this context, ci means there, here, or to there, and just like ne, it is invariable.
Italians call this “ci locativo”, and it used with all sorts of places.
These can be cities, countries, restaurants, or just a particular room.
As you can see from these examples, ci doesn’t need to respect any agreement with the word
it substitutes.
Now we will highlight a second use for this pronoun.
There are verbs in Italian that are constructed with the preposition “a”.
The presence of this preposition will prevent you from using any lo, la, li, or le pronoun,
because these are direct pronouns.
So we use the invariable ci instead, and in this case it’s called “ci argomentale”.
Here are some of the verbs that will use this pronoun:
These are the most common ones.
In these cases, ci takes the meaning of “about it” or “about them”, which in Italian
sounds more like “of it” or “of them”.
A third use for this pronoun is called “ci pleonastico”, or “idiomatico”.
This is a fancy way of saying superfluous, or unnecessary.
You may hear it in colloquial Italian but it doesn’t have any specific meaning, it
just gives more emphasis to the expression.
Now we have a number of applications for the pronoun “ci”, so in order to make sure
we have everything under control, let’s check comprehension.