Alternate sentence constructions using se

Question

As in my last question, I’m doing an exercise from Spanish Grammar Drills. Chapter 5 (Reflexive Verbs), exercise 24, says to rearrange some sentences like the following examples: Tu casa se va a quemar --> Se te va a quemar la casa. El ordenador de Mari se rompió. --> A Mari se le rompió el ordenador.

There were 15 sentences, I did OK for the first eight but the sentences got more complex and I melted down on the second half, much of it due to confusion about the order for constructing the sentences as they added in extra prepositional phrases etc. The text doesn’t talk about this manner of constructing sentences like “It’s going to burn down on you, your house.” I don’t even know if there’s a name for it, the text doesn’t say. Does anyone know a page that discusses this.

Answer 1

Julian's answer is of course right here. And as he said, some of this is not reflexive, thus you not finding relevant examples, so I´ll add only insomuch as helping you find some references that are applicable in your own materials.

In our text, it was called something like "Use of "se" for unintended or accidental actions" and is actually a form of passive, not reflexive, use of se.

Check you're book's contents or index for unintended or accidental or unplanned incidents/occurrences/actions and you will find more on it.

Active voice. Olvidé mi llave. Passive voice. Se me olvidó la llave. Passive plural. Se me olvidaron las llaves.

hth roger

BTW I made a PDF of most of that course, it's a bit challenging but he's really good. It's a reasonable 1.3 MB in size. I can email it to anyone who's interested. - Georgia_Boy, Apr 18, 2013

Your message reminded me of Fred Jehle's second year spanish composition course, which has a section on the passive voice. I've got it in front of me here and it does talk about se constructions, it has a practice section too. - Georgia_Boy, Apr 18, 2013

Well said about passive voice, Roger. I forgot to mention that - 005faa61, Apr 18, 2013

Answer 2

I can´t say where to find this information you want, but if you search under reflexive it probably won´t be there because the use of se in these cases is not really reflexive. It merely indicates who is affected by the action.

Your use of se in the above sentences is correct and in more complex sentences the se preceding the personal pronoun will be the same.

I made a mistake; the personal pronoun actually indicates who is afected by the action, in this case "les". Roger is right that "se" indicates passive voice - 005faa61, Apr 18, 2013

Answer 3

Let me try a followup. One of the ones I got wrong was: La pelota de mis amigos se les perdió en los arbustos.

I wrote: Se les perdió en los arbustos la pelota de mis amigos. The correct answer was: A mis amigos se les perdió la pelota en los arbustos.

Was my version wrong, correct but not preferred, or also OK?

Thanks for your help.

Your answer is correct as well. The test answer due to word order requires the personal "a" but your answer is perfect and actually more elegant - 005faa61, Apr 17, 2013

Thanks ... the answer key in the book doesn't give any alternate answers, so I didn't know if the parts of the sentence could be ordered the way I did it. - Georgia_Boy, Apr 17, 2013

Spanish is quite liberal with word order so the more clauses in a sentence, the more possibilities of structure - 005faa61, Apr 17, 2013

Answer 4

Please check your answers correctly!

It is the wrong answer as I said in my previous post.

Georgia_boy wrote

I wrote: Se les perdió en los arbustos la pelota de mis amigos. The correct answer was: A mis amigos se les perdió la pelota en los arbustos.

You practically wrote:

They (?) (got) lost my friends' ball in the bushes.

They, who?

Answer 5

It was wrong.

Do you know English grammar. I ask you because I don't know neither Spanish nor English grammar, but I imagine that in English when posed with the same problem.

My friend's ball got lost in the bushes, in order to know you would need to ask "(To) whom the ball got lost from?" or something like that.

And the answer is:

(to) my friend.

Right?