Imagine you are on a terrace, with the heat sticking to your skin, a glass with ice in front of you, and you ask your companions if they want to go for a swim. One of them replies: “No, thank you. Consequently, I will proceed to leave the establishment.” You will probably look at them strangely, not because you haven't understood the sentence or because there's any problem with the syntax, but because it's hard to imagine someone speaking like that in that situation. The most probable thing would have been for them to say “No, I’m going home” or simply “I’m leaving”.

There are verses that go in one ear and out the other. And there are those that, on any given day, make you stop. The other day, stuck in one of the usual traffic jams on the Mallorcan motorways, I noticed a line from Tobogan, by Zoo: “He had to work it out”. I noticed it because the same group, in Vull, sings: “If someone has to cry, let them cry”. It’s not that the line grated on me, nor was it (obviously!) the first time I had heard it. However, it made me think about the hesitation that still exists today in one of the most emblematic constructions of syntactic grammar.

You may have said more than once, "I like coffee but I hate tea." These are two simple, almost symmetrical sentences that express your preferences. If we pay attention, we'll see that they don't function the same way. In "I like coffee," the subject is coffee, not "I." The speaker appears as the indirect object: "(coffee) is liked by me." In contrast, in "I hate tea," "I" is the subject, while "tea" is the direct object. They express similar experiences, but with different grammatical structures. Verbs like "to like" and "to hate," as well as "to worry," "to frighten," "to interest," and "to bother," are examples of what linguists call psychological verbs—verbs that express mental or emotional states. They all share the same situation: there is someone who feels an emotion (the experiencer) and something that provokes it (the stimulus or theme). What changes between languages—and even within the same language—is how these two roles are organized in the sentence.

When students return to school in September and write the typical "what I did this summer" questions, the answers are almost always the same: "I went to the beach," "I saw my friends," "I made my summer notebook." All with 'haber'. Now, anyone who has browsed through old texts or spoken with sponsors from certain places knows that things haven't always been so uniform. In many corners of the country, there are still people who, upon setting foot somewhere, explain that they've arrived, or that, upon seeing us, they're happy to have us back, with 'ser' instead of 'haber'.