Tough grammar question
This is a practice sentence in a Spanish grammar book in the section on reflexive verbs:
"A Roberta se le rompió mi reloj."
"Roberta broke my watch." Simple enough. But why the "A"?. A personal "a"? But "Roberta" isn't a direct object. Why the indirect object pronoun "le"? If she broke "to me" or "for me" the pronoun should be "me". Maybe this is an error in the book.
8 Answers
This is just a guess but maybe that structure indicates the Roberta broke your watch but didn't mean to do it.
Let's wait for an "expert" cos I don't know either.
"A Roberta se le rompió mi reloj."
"Roberta broke my watch." Simple enough. But why the "A"?. A personal "a"? But "Roberta" isn't a direct object. Why the indirect object pronoun "le"? If she broke "to me" or "for me" the pronoun should be "me". Maybe this is an error in the book.
It is not a "personal a", but an indirect object "a". The subject of the sentence is "mi reloj", because that sentence is saying in a way "My watch broke [while Roberta had it]", where "a Roberta" is an indirect object that implicates her in the "accident", and I'm saying "accident" because the watch could have actually broken while Roberta had it, even if it wasn't her fault. This very common construction with that "se rompió" (=broke) plus an indirect object deflects the responsability away from the person.
The alternative, "Roberta rompió mi rejoj", has Roberta as a subject (and therefore no "a") and the watch as an object. This sentence would be "Roberta broke the watch". Quite different sentences.
Here you go : http://www.indiana.edu/~call/reglas/pron_se.html
The so-called "No fault" or accidental 'se' is related to the reflexive and passive use. For example, in English speakers say:
I drop the keys.In Spanish, the idea is that it wasn't me who drops them on purpose, the action was not intended to happen. Hence, the action is attributed to the keys, while the 'I' becomes an indirect object.
Se me caen las llaves.If the intended idea is that I drop the keys on purpose, then a verb such as 'to throw' (tirar) or another equivalent of 'to drop' (dejar caer) would be used.
I drop the keys.(Yo) Tiro las llaves. (Yo) Dejo caer las llaves.
dear ian-hill I hope to help you enogh and clear about the problem. it is my experience during the learning spanish.
1-you know, one of the usage of the word "a" in spanish is for "by". for example, if I ask you "how you lift it", you can reply in espanish "a mano" = by hand. it is kind of usage of "a". here the word "a Roberta" means "by Roberta".
2- the next point is that, one of the common way of exprssing something in spanish is to use passive and reflexive form of the verb. the sign of this, in verbs is "se". so "se" make the verb "rampió" here passive. so it means " is broken".
3- "le" befor verb here is used as indirect objctive pronoun. it means here "it". and "mi" is possesive adjective that means "my".
so, the exact meaning of the sentnce is this:
"by Roberta it is broken my watch" and its fluent translation in english is "Roberta broke my watch" or " my watch is broken by Roberta"
hope to be useful. by
Le is the indirect object pronoun and is required even though the indirect object is named (Roberta). The watch broke on Roberta (I mean "on" in the same sense as "he went stupid on me"...however, don't think a = on. No, a just is the preposition that introduces all named indirect objects.
Personal a introduces named direct object that are people or pets (and a few others). A Roberta is not an example of personal a because Roberta is not a direct object.
Mi reloj is actually the subject of the Spanish sentence.
I think this is a case of passive se, but I could be wrong.
¡Muchas gracias, amigos!
