Verbs like Caracterizar?

Question

I was reading through some text when I came upon the sentence, "A las personas que componen esta generación los caracterizan su conocimiento de la tecnología, su alto grado de escolarización, ..." I am not quite sure how this sentence is grammatically structured. It seems like it would be in the passive voice, but there is no "ser" verb or "se" pronoun. It looks like "caracterizan" is acting like a "gustar" type verb, but instead of using a i.o. pronoun, it is using a d.o. pronoun. What is up here?

Answer 1

Ninjaboy, I concur with francobollo.

My translation of the passage would be " The people that configure/form this generation are characterized by their knowledge of technology and their high degree of education"

Scholarization does not exist in English and "scholarity" seems to be in the unabridged version of the dictionaries.

Does it help any?

That makes a lot of sense. What I think I was hung up on was the fact that I forgot that "a" can be used to introduce direct objects, I was only thinking about it's usage concerning indirect objects. So there was a little cognitive dissidence. - NinjaBoy, Apr 24, 2013

Answer 2

Caracterizar a alguien (with the personal a) means to characterize someone as something.

Caracterizar a can also mean to play a role (Meryl Streep caracterizó a Margaret Thatcher) en una película.

Caracterizar alone is attributed to non humans or house pets (El clima que caracteriza esta región es árido y seco)

Answer 3

Good question! First, as you've probably already figured out, the subject of the sentence is su conocimiento de la tecnología, su alto grado de escolarización, .... That said, it's expected that the verb would be conjugated with the plural ending (though I think I've seen cases where the verb is still singular, but I'm not sure which is truly grammatically correct). I'm sure you already figured that was the case, so let's go to your question about the IO or DO pronoun. Here the DO pronoun is used because it is directly referring to las personas. The construction of this sentence is kind of confusing, especially because they use the masculine pronoun to refer to las personas. I could be wrong, but it seems like the sentence uses a las personas....los caracterizan to serve as emphasis as opposed to this less emphatic, straightforward version: "su conocimiento de la tecnología, su alto grado de escolarización...caracterizan a las personas..." So the pronoun is in DO form because las personas are truly being acted upon in a direct way, unlike in the verbs like gustar.

Ahh, okay. The 'a' is used as the personal 'a' to introduce the direct object! What this really just comes down to is using the flexibility of spanish sentence structure in order to emphasize "las personas". - NinjaBoy, Apr 24, 2013

Thanks , so much! - NinjaBoy, Apr 24, 2013

exactly! :) - LaPiedraAlegre, Apr 24, 2013