"La comida se está cocinando"
I asked the question, "How do you say the food is cooking?". One of the answers were, "La comida se está cocinando".
Why is "se" necessary. Is it a reflexive way of saying the food is cooking itself or, a passive way of saying something is cooking, with la comida added for emphasis?
How would I know when to use se in this context? To me, "la comida está cocinando" would be just fine.
Also, I have read many articles on passive and impersonal se. There is a slight difference that I don't understand. Please explain.
7 Answers
The passive se is used to indicate that it is the food that is cooking as opposed to the food cooking something else. If you replace "la comida" with "Juan" you get:
La comida está cocinando. (talented food)
Juan está cocinando. (hope he's a good cook)
La comida se está cocinando. (good, I'm hungy)
Juan se está cocinando. (poor Juan)
Without the "se" it would appear to say "the meal is cooking" but what is the meal cooking, another meal? I believe without the "se" the sentence is incomplete to a Spaniard. I would relate this to a previous answer given by one of experts, Lazarus, which was as follows.
These transitive verbs assume that there is something or someone (an object) upon which the action is applied, so if you say "el barco hundió" (the ship sunk), you cannot assume that the ship just couldn't float anymore, since the verb is transitive. The sentence is incomplete in Spanish because after hearing "The ship sunk", any native would be expecting an object, i.e. something to sink. So, the ship sunk... another ship perhaps? Without an object, the sentence sounds incomplete and makes no sense. Spanish's solution for this is add an extra "se" that turns the verb into intransitive, so no object is expected, and everything is assumed to be related to the subject. For example, "El barco se hundió" would be "The ship sunk", but this time, the "se" tells us that this ship is not sinking other ships or anything else, but it is just sinking, nothing more.
"Haciendo" or "Cocinando" is probably a matter of region. I, too, am more accostumed to hearing "Haciendo" and "Preparando," but this doesn´t necessarily make "Cocinando" wrong.
This phrase can be made into passive voice by changing the placement of "se." "Se está haciendo la comida" ............... "The food is being cooked."
¿la comida se está cocinando?
It may be grammatically correct, but that expression sounds very awkward to me .
La comida está en el fuego / horno would have been my choice.
"The food is cooking" is a difficult sentence for me gramatically even in English, perhaps because the last time I had a class in English grammar was in 1969, but the way I see it is that cooking is a present participle acting as a verbal because cooking is clearly not acting as a noun and
"The food is very cooking" is not a sentence while
"The food is cooking rapidly." is.
Thus the food is the object of the verbal and is in the position of the subject,making it a passive construction. However, the progressive participle construction is generally considered to be in the active voice--and all of the usual examples have the subject of the verb acting as the agent, which is not the case in this example since the agent is never mentioned.
I have yet to fully understand this either, but, my experience so far is that it is better to consider this se as simply a signal that you are making a passive sentence as opposed to trying to feel like it has any relation to the pronoun se.
(correction: the SE in root1's example is NOT passive SE, which root1 never indicated it was...for some reason I assumed it was, though).
Lazarus said:
Technically speaking, it is NOT a passive. There are some conditions to be met in a sentence to be classified as a passive. -
I would love for you to explain this further. Does it have to do with the position of the se, is it impersonal, or is it something else?
