The decision to use a Reflexive pronoun **Grey Area**
According to Dorothy Richmond in Practice Makes Perfect: Spanish Pronouns and Prepositions:
It is important to note that nearly all verbs can be made reflexive. There is nothing magical about a reflexive verb. All it means is that the action is not leaving the performer.
My question is: Are there sometimes Grey areas when you really have a choice to use a reflexive pronoun or not?
For example, here are the answers to translation excersises 11-4 #'s 8 and 9.
- él toma una pastilla cada noche para dormirse.
- Algunas personas meditan para relajarse.
Couldn't you add reflexive pronouns to these sentences before tomar and meditar
1.él se toma una pastilla cada noche para dormirse
2.Algunas personas se meditan para relajarse
After all, it seems the action of the verb is staying with the actor. He takes a pill himself. And they themselves are the ones meditating. Perhaps it is optional, or maybe I am missing something.
I suppose when you take a pill the action is leaving the preformer and going to the pill. As such you would not say: Me como la comida.
5 Answers
I want to make a quick note here. Samdie has given a very good response.
There are many areas of Spanish-speaking people (some may say they are uneducated, rural, but I'll not go there) who do not use the reflexive as you have described.
They will use the sentence construction given in the later portion of your question, if they construct the sentence that accurately. If you use a reflexive, they will look at you funny and not understand what you are saying.
The best advice I can offer is to listen to people. Take note of how they speak. Then communicate with them accordingly.
I hope that makes sense. There is often a difference between grammar and communication.
Sure. The way to accomplish this is to label all uses of "se" as reflexive. Of course, when you do that, "reflexive" loses its traditional meaning (in fact, it comes to mean nothing more than "There is a 'se' floating about somewhere nearby.")
The obvious virtue of this approach is that it sidesteps the need for deeper analysis (avoids complications). If you're taking Spanish in school, slavishly regurgitate what your teacher tells you If you simply want to learn Spanish, the situation is more difficult. There are about a dozen different uses for "se" (only one of which is reflexive, constructions). Your best bet is to learn (internalize) a lot of expressions without worrying about the nomenclature. The typical Spanish speaker is no more able to "explain" the grammar of Spanish than you are of English.They, simply, remember and reproduce utterances.
After all, it seems the action of the verb is staying with the actor.
You've misinterpreted the statement, I'm afraid. In "Toma una pastilla cada noche", the action involves an external participant (the pill), so the action does not "stay" with the subject: it involves both the person and the pill. Either there is nothing external to the person, like in "He sleeps", where there is no interaction with pills or anything other than the person herself, or you switch the focus to the pill, and say something like "Las pastillas se toman con agua" (pills are taken with water), where the only explicit "participant" is the pills (obviously, there must be someone to take them, but no one is mentioned whatsoever).
I suppose when you take a pill the action is leaving the preformer and going to the pill.
Correct!
Now, going back to your sentences, the first one does accept the 'se', but this is a different kind of 'se' from the one that you've read in the book. "Se toma una pastilla" means that he/she eats up the whole pill, where this 'se' indicates completion. "Meditar" can also accept a similar 'se', but only in its transitive usage, i.e. when you meditate something... completely. If you use it intransitively, as in "He meditates every night", you cannot add a 'se'.
As such you would not say: Me como la comida.
Yes, you would, because of what I explained before: with transitive verbs, you can indicate completion with 'se' when the task is specific.
P.D. I have a book from D. Richmond about Spanish verbs, and it is full of nonsense, if you ask me.
So to indicate completion with a reflexive pronoun (as long as there is a transitive verb) you would say
Me comí el burrito. = I ate the entire burrito
Me tomé el agua = I drank all the water
Any by transitive verb you mean verbs that aren't like gustar right?
As far as I know, it doesn't matter if you choose tomar or tomarse una pastilla. The reflexive pronoun in this case acts to provide emphasis. A similiar example is with comer. Comer means "to eat" but by adding the reflexive pronoun to make it comerse, you add emphasis and the meaning becomes "to eat up/it all". One thing I have noticed though is that the doctor has always told me tomarse. I think tomarse is more common than tomar when talking about medicine, perhaps because you want to ensure that you take all of it.
