Please help me understand "María vuelve a leer el libro"

Question

Hola!

I came across the sentence: "María vuelve a leer el libro"

Would this mean:

1. "Maria returns to reading the book" (she was reading, stopped for a while then started again), or

2. "Maria reads the book again" (she finished reading it and is reading it again)

Any help much appreciated!

Muchas gracias, Rangi

Answer 1

According to WordReference.com (Spanish to English) volver can also mean recomenzar to start or begin again, resume. So actually your 2 examples are both correct and the clarification as to which was most appropriate would be from the context of the sentence. As it stands maybe "Maria started reading the book again." would be the best.

No he escrito en el foro hace mucho tiempo pero vuelvo a contestar con esta pregunta.

Thank you very much for the explanation. I suspected that perhaps both might be correct. Muchas gracias! - Rangi, Jan 30, 2017

Hola amigo. Good to see you, hope all is well. :) - rac1, Jan 30, 2017