Chapter 45 · B1

Verbal Periphrases (Perífrasis Verbales)

Might help first: Ch. 25 — Present Progressive, Ch. 33 — El Futuro Simple, Ch. 12 — Direct Object Pronouns, Ch. 23 — Present Tense: Stem-Changing & Irregular Verbs (a suggestion, never a requirement)

Spanish has dozens of everyday constructions that pair a conjugated verb with an infinitive or a gerund to build a meaning neither verb carries alone: a near-future plan, an action that just finished, something happening again, an obligation, a habit still going strong. English does the same kind of thing constantly — “I’m going to leave,” “I just ate,” “I have to go” — without ever giving the pattern a name. Spanish grammar does: perífrasis verbal, “verbal periphrasis,” literally a roundabout way of saying something a single verb form can’t say alone. You’ve already met several of these piecemeal, previewed in earlier chapters — ir a + infinitivo in Chapters 22, 33, and 36; seguir/andar/llevar + gerundio in Chapter 25. This chapter gathers all of them in one place, gives each its full treatment, and — more importantly — shows that they share one underlying skeleton. That shared shape is the real insight to take from this chapter, more than any single construction on the list.

Core Pattern: One Skeleton, Three Kinds of Link

The shape every periphrasis shares

Every verbal periphrasis has the same three-part anatomy: a conjugated verb that carries all the person, number, and tense information, followed by an optional link, followed by a non-finite form — an infinitive (Chapter 42) or a gerund (Chapter 43), never a second conjugated verb. What varies from one periphrasis to the next isn’t the shape, only what fills the middle slot: nothing at all, a fixed preposition, or the word que.

Deboverbsalir.verb

Voyverbaconnectorsalir.verb

Tengoverbqueconnectorsalir.verb

Three different meanings — “I should leave,” “I’m going to leave,” “I have to leave” — built from the exact same three-slot skeleton, just with a different link (none, a, que) filling the middle.

Why the shared shape matters more than any single item on the list

Once you can recognize this skeleton, learning a new periphrasis stops being “memorize a whole new sentence pattern” and becomes “learn this construction’s link and its meaning” — a much smaller task. It also explains why periphrases show up throughout earlier chapters without being named as a group: estar + gerundio (Chapter 25) is a periphrasis (no link), and you’ll meet modal-flavored ones like poder/querer + infinitivo elsewhere, all built on this identical frame. The six constructions below are simply the members of this family substantial enough, and common enough, to deserve their own dedicated tour.

Building Out: Six Periphrases, One at a Time

Ir a + infinitivo: the true home of the near future

Ir, conjugated in the present (Chapter 23: voy, vas, va, vamos, vais, van), plus a, plus an infinitive — Spanish’s everyday way to talk about something planned, decided, or expected to happen soon:

Voy a comer paella esta noche.

I'm going to eat paella tonight.

¿Vais a venir a la fiesta?

Are you all going to come to the party?

Va a llover esta tarde.

It's going to rain this afternoon.

Chapter 33 already introduced this construction enough to use it correctly and contrasted it with the futuro simple (roughly: ir a + inf. for near, decided, conversational plans; futuro simple for predictions, promises, and more formal register). Nothing about that contrast changes here — this section is about rounding out everything Chapter 33 didn’t have room for.

Object pronouns with ir a + infinitivo

Because the non-finite form here is a plain infinitive, pronoun placement follows the exact two-position rule Chapter 12 established for every conjugated-verb-plus-infinitive pairing: attach the pronoun to the end of the infinitive, or move it in front of the whole ir a unit. Both are equally correct and mean exactly the same thing.

Voyverbaconnectorcomprarlo.verb

Lopronounvoyverbaconnectorcomprar.verb

Voy a llamarte mañana. / Te voy a llamar mañana.

I'm going to call you tomorrow.

Identical meaning — free stylistic variation, just like with any other infinitive pairing.

Idiomatic extensions of ir a

A few fixed expressions grow directly out of ir a, worth recognizing as set phrases rather than working out from scratch each time:

¡Vamos!

Come on! / Let's go!

As a standalone interjection, vamos is encouragement or urging, not literally 'we go' — context, not grammar, tells the two apart.

Vamos a ver qué pasa.

Let's see what happens.

vamos a ver — a fixed way to signal 'we'll find out,' used constantly even with no literal seeing involved.

¿Vienes a la fiesta? Va a ser que no.

Are you coming to the party? Guess not.

va a ser que no — a common hedging idiom for softly declining or predicting a negative outcome, literally 'it's going to be that no.'

Acabar de + infinitivo: something just happened

Acabar de + infinitive describes an action completed in the immediate past — English’s “just did something.” The grammatical twist worth noticing: acabar itself sits in the present tense here, not the past, even though the meaning is squarely about something already finished.

Acabo de comer.

I just ate.

Acabo is present tense — Spanish doesn't reach for a past tense at all to say 'just did,' unlike English's 'just + past tense.'

Acaban de llegar.

They just arrived.

Acabar de in the imperfect: “had just” done something

The same construction shifts naturally into the imperfect to describe something that had just happened relative to a point in the past — the exact past-tense parallel of the present-tense pattern above:

Acababa de llegar cuando sonó el teléfono.

I had just arrived when the phone rang.

acababa (imperfect) + de + llegar — the past-time version of acabo de llegar.

Volver a + infinitivo: doing it again

Volver a + infinitive means “to do something again” — a cleaner, more compact alternative to tacking otra vez onto the plain verb, and the more natural choice in a great deal of everyday Spanish:

Volvió a llamar.

He called again.

Cleaner and more common than Llamó otra vez for many everyday contexts, though both are correct.

No vuelvas a hacerlo.

Don't do it again.

Nuance, Exceptions & Contrast

Llevar + gerundio: framing duration

Llevar + gerund is genuinely one of the most useful constructions in this chapter, and it has no single-word English equivalent — it frames how long an action has been ongoing:

Llevo dos años estudiando español.

I've been studying Spanish for two years.

Not he estudiado — Spanish doesn't reach for a perfect tense here at all; llevar + gerund is the natural way to frame ongoing duration.

Llevamos una hora esperando el autobús.

We've been waiting for the bus for an hour.

Llevar extends the same duration logic to a negative action with sin + infinitive instead of a gerund:

Llevo tres días sin dormir bien.

I haven't slept well in three days.

sin + infinitive replaces the gerund when the ongoing state is the absence of an action.

Tener que, haber que, and deber: three ways to say “must”

Spanish doesn’t have one all-purpose word for obligation — it has three, and they aren’t interchangeable. Which one fits depends on who the obligation belongs to and how strong it is.

Tener que + infinitivo is personal, subject-specific obligation — something this particular person has to do. Tener conjugates exactly as it did in Chapter 23 (tengo, tienes, tiene, tenemos, tenéis, tienen); que simply follows every form:

Tengo que terminar el informe hoy.

I have to finish the report today.

A concrete obligation tied to yo specifically.

Haber que + infinitivo is impersonal, general obligation — something that needs doing, with no specific person named as responsible. Unlike tener que, this construction never personalizes: it only ever exists as hay que (present), había que (imperfect), habrá que (future), and so on — the same invariant hay you met as an existential in Chapter 30 and will see again in full in Chapter 47:

Hay que estudiar mucho para aprobar.

One has to study a lot to pass. / It's necessary to study a lot to pass.

No subject at all — hay que never conjugates for person.

Deber (+ infinitivo) is the softest of the three — “should” or “ought to” rather than a hard requirement. It conjugates as a fully regular -er verb, with no irregularity to flag:

Deberías dormir más.

You should sleep more.

The conditional deberías (Chapter 34) softens the advice even further — extremely common for suggestions.

Debemos ser puntuales.

We should be punctual.

Seguir/continuar (and andar) + gerundio: staying in motion

Seguir + gerund means to keep on doing something, with no interruption — an action that started before now and hasn’t stopped:

Sigue lloviendo.

It's still raining.

Seguimos esperando una respuesta.

We're still waiting for an answer.

Continuar + gerund means the same thing and is fully interchangeable with seguir, just a shade more formal:

El precio continúa subiendo.

The price keeps rising.

A close relative rounds out this family: andar + gerund also describes an ongoing action, but it typically adds a mildly restless, critical, or gossipy undertone that neither seguir nor continuar carries — English usually needs a whole extra phrase (“going around,” “walking around”) to capture the same flavor:

Anda diciendo que va a dejar el trabajo.

He's going around saying he's going to quit his job.

andar + gerund — the ongoing action is framed with a hint of disapproval or gossip that plain estar + gerund (Chapter 25) wouldn't carry.

Bringing It Together

Periphrasis	Meaning	Example
ir a + inf.	near future, plan	voy a salir
acabar de + inf.	just did something	acabo de salir
volver a + inf.	do it again	volví a salir
llevar + gerundio	ongoing duration	llevo una hora esperando
tener que + inf.	personal obligation	tengo que salir
hay que + inf.	impersonal obligation	hay que salir temprano
deber (+ inf.)	should / ought to	debo salir
seguir/continuar + gerundio	uninterrupted continuation	sigo esperando

Llevo media hora esperando y todavía no ha llegado. Acaba de escribirme que va a salir tarde otra vez — tengo que avisar a los demás, aunque supongo que va a ser que no llegamos a tiempo.

I've been waiting half an hour and he still hasn't arrived. He just texted me that he's going to be late again — I have to let the others know, though I guess we're not going to make it on time.

llevo...esperando (duration), acaba de escribirme (just happened), va a salir (near future), tengo que (personal obligation), va a ser que no (hedging idiom) — five different periphrases, one short exchange.

Faced with a sentence that needs a meaning English would build with “going to,” “just,” “again,” “have been doing,” or “have to,” check first whether Spanish already has a dedicated periphrasis for it — it almost always does. Identify the conjugated verb, find its link (none, a preposition, or que), and attach the infinitive or gerund the construction calls for. The six constructions above cover the everyday core of the whole system.

Where to Go Next

Chapter 22, Present Tense: Regular Verbs and Chapter 33, El Futuro Simple — where ir a + infinitivo was first previewed as one option among several for talking about the future.
Chapter 25, Present Progressive — estar + gerund, this chapter’s closest structural relative, and the first preview of seguir/andar/llevar + gerund.
Chapter 36, Commands — vamos a + infinitive as the everyday alternative to the nosotros command form.
Chapter 12, Direct Object Pronouns — the placement rule this chapter’s ir a + infinitivo pronouns follow exactly.
Chapter 42, The Infinitive: Forms & Functions and Chapter 43, The Gerund: Forms & Functions — the two non-finite forms every periphrasis in this chapter is built on, each with its own range of jobs beyond the periphrases here.
Chapter 44, The Past Participle: Forms & Agreement — llevar + participle, easy to confuse with this chapter’s llevar + gerund but a genuinely different construction.
Chapter 34, El Condicional Simple — debería, the softened conditional form of deber used constantly for gentle advice.
Chapter 47, Impersonal Constructions — hay’s fuller treatment alongside Spanish’s other subjectless forms, including hay que.

Ready to practice?

12 exercises · multiple-choice, fill-blank, sentence-transformation…