pedestrian", and "run in a thief" into Spanish requires completely different verbs, and not simply the use of ("run") plus the corresponding Spanish preposition. This is more due to the nature of English phrasal verbs rather than an inherent function of Spanish verbs or prepositions. Conjunctions The Spanish conjunctions ('and') and ('or') alter their form in both spoken and written language to and respectively when followed by an identical vowel sound. Thus, ('father and son'), ('Ferdinand and Isabella'), ('subject or object'), ('vertical or horizontal'). The change does not take place before the of a diphthong, as in ('steel and iron'). Nor does the conjunction change when initial in a question (where it serves to introduce or reintroduce a name as a topic, rather than to link one element with another), as in ('What about Inés?'). When the conjunction appears between numerals, it is usually spelled with an accent mark (), in order to distinguish it from zero (0); thus, ('2 or 3') in contrast to ('two-hundred three'). Syntax and syntactic variation Order of constituents Spanish unmarked word order for affirmative declarative sentences is subject-verb-object (SVO); however, as in other Romance languages, in practice, word order is more variable, with topicalization and focus being the primary factors in the selection of a particular order. Verb-subject-object (VSO), verb-object-subject (VOS), and object-verb-subject (OVS) are also relatively common, while other orders are very uncommon outside of poetry. Thus, to simply say, "My friend wrote the book", one would say (SVO): Although bare VSO and VOS are somewhat rare in declarative independent clauses, they are quite common in sentences in which something other than the subject or direct object functions as the focus. For example: or = "A few years ago, my friend wrote a book" or = "Yesterday, my mother saw my friend and asked him about his book" In many dependent clauses, the verb is placed before the subject (and thus often VSO or VOS) to avoid placing the verb in final position: , but rarely = "This is the book that my friend wrote" A sentence in which the direct object is the topic or "theme" (old information), while the subject is part of the comment, or "rheme" (new information), often assumes OVS order. In this case the direct object noun phrase is supplemented with the appropriate direct object pronoun; for example: Because subject pronouns are often dropped, one will often see