Reflexive pronoun necessary or not?
Hi there, Please help with small discussion I have just had. The sentence is: John broke his leg in Zermatt in 1977
Is it,
Juan rompió su pierna en 1977 OR
Juan se rompió la pierna en 1977
Or are they both ok?
If the reflexive pronoun is necessary, ie. the second sentence, why is that?
Thanks very much
V
2 Answers
The reflexive is necessary because it is his own leg that he broke. Likewise if you are talking about a you, him, her or it the reflexive is used as long as the same person you are talking about got a broken leg without mentioning somebody else breaking this persons leg. If you say Maria gave Juan a black eye then this is different and the reflexive would not be used.
I'll mention another type of sentence structure you should be aware of.
Le cortaron el pelo demasiado corto.
This means, they cut his hair too short.
You might think this should be translated as
Cortaron su pelo demasiado corto.
However...in Spanish you usually don't refer to body parts with possessive adjectives. You don't say mi brazo for my arm for example, you say el brazo.
However, you still want to get across the idea that the overly short haircut happened to him. So you use the indirect pronoun le in front of the verb. This looks confusing at first because you start getting used to seeing reflexive structures after a while and the reflexive pronoun always agrees with the conjugation of the verb: me corté, te cortaste, se cortó, nos cortamos, se cortaron, etc. But then you see a structure with me cortaron or te cortaron and you wonder why the verb isn't conjugated consistently with what you think is a reflexive pronoun.
By the way, I think the easiest way to make sense of this type of sentence is to initially think in English that it means: "They gave an overly short haircut to him." Even though the word "gave" and "haircut" are not stated, from a grammatical point of view this is what is happening and explains why the indirect object pronoun shows up at the beginning of the sentence.
For example:
Me cortaron el pelo muy corto.
They cut my hair very short.
The verb is conjugated in third person plural, while the pronoun is the first person indirect object...an my hair doesn't show up at all.
What makes this potentially more confusing is that me and te are the same pronouns for direct object, indirect object and reflexive. It's a little easier to see with third person singular because him is (lo, le and se) and her is (la, le, and se) for DO, IO and reflexive.
This type of sentence structure is called "dative of interest" by the way.
The reflexive pronoun is necessary: Juan se rompió la pierna en 1977.
