"le está dando"

Question

In the sentence "El portero le está dando la llave al invitado." I am interested in the "le" function is it just the part of "darle" which is moved?

Answer 1

Try this: why do you say "it" in "I like it when you arrive early"? That "it" means "when you arrive early", so why saying it twice? It is called anticipatory "it", because it warns the hearer about what's coming afterwards (plus something else more complex that I won't explain here). That "le" is "al invitado", and it is another type of anticipatory pronoun (again, I omit the complex part).