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Me lleva vs me llevo | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| ratis Hexaglot Newbie Germany Joined 5104 days ago 28 posts - 43 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Italian, Spanish, Latin Studies: Czech, Japanese Studies: Hindi | Message 17 of 44 29 December 2010 at 11:13am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Yep, and that's because the subject here is still the (not called out) pronoun "it". It's not about something like "the eating and the preparing". As I explained earlier, the whole construction is what is referred to in the 3rd person, no matter if it describes just a single thing/action or multiple. It's the same as in English: You would say "it TAKES me a long time to eat and prepare", not "it take...", just that in Spanish, you leave out the it. I really don't see why the action that takes a long time should NOT be the subject? Everything else would fly in the face of reason, at least for linguists. Try to see it in a more mechanical way - that's how grammar works. See also http://www.brighthub.com/education/lan guages/articles/39168.aspx:
If you will forgive my bluntness, natives surely know best which constructions are correct, however, they may not be the best to explain their mother tongues' grammar. Edited by ratis on 29 December 2010 at 11:15am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6012 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes  Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 18 of 44 29 December 2010 at 1:40pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Yes, that's true.
Now I have no reason to say that's wrong, but I do not recall ever having seen any sentence with the infinitive in that position. The dictionary examples that you quote don't feature the infinitive in word-initial position:
Googling "prepararme me lleva" in Google gives two hits: this thread and one page where there's a full stop in the middle: "Me lleva una hora prepararme. Me lleva. A mi me lleva una hora prepararme." My dictionary (Oxford Spanish) also only gives examples with the verb phrase in word-final position. With "hacerlo me lleva", there's one match in the first page that seems to use "hacerlo" as a subject. However, it looks like cheap romantic fiction, and you can't rule out the possibility that the writer is trying to use fancy grammar and is making a false assumption.
The English translation may be a source of confusion, or it may be a source of illumination -- it's difficult to say. It's true that just because there's a dummy subject ("it") in English doesn't mean that there's a dummy subject (unspoken "ello") in Spanish. However, it does highlight the fact that dummy subjects are possible. Whether learners or natives, we shouldn't jump to any conclusions. I've made a fool of myself quite often here by doing exactly that. Routledge's Modern Spanish Grammar: A Practical Guide (second edition) doesn't seem to cover this, so I'll reserve judgement for now. At least if I keep the verb at the end I'll never be wrong. However, I would point out that "llevar" is used for a lot of different things, and quite often you'll find that languages tend to use subtly different structures to disambiguate the meaning. "llevar" with a subject usually refers to being "taken to" somewhere, and "llevarse" is to spend a lot of time doing something. A dummy subject would give us a third option. But that doesn't mean I'm right. You've got your theory, I've got mine. We can't prove either by logic -- it requires evidence, and right now I'm not planning to do a corpus investigation on it. If anyone has a corpus-derived grammar that says one way or the other, please let us know!
Yes -- a singular neuter in Spanish can refer to a complex phrase.
Unfortunately, "no reason why not" is valueless in language study. Why do we say the things we do? Why do we have "no" and "not" in English, when Spanish gets away with using just "no"? There's no reason why we couldn't use the same word, but as it turns out, we don't. Arguing logic gets us nowhere in language, because each language works by a mixture of logic systems and arbitrary exceptions.
No-one is denying the existence of infinitive-as-subject. The matter at hand here is whether it is a subject in this construction or not. Your quote says nothing about this.
Before I studied English, I believed many things that just weren't true about English. If you want to see how little awareness most natives have of their language, just ask an English speaker the difference between the "going to" and "will" tenses. I've never met anyone who hasn't studied and/or taught English who could answer the question.... 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ratis Hexaglot Newbie Germany Joined 5104 days ago 28 posts - 43 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Italian, Spanish, Latin Studies: Czech, Japanese Studies: Hindi | Message 19 of 44 29 December 2010 at 2:48pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Good point about the "why not" argument and logic being of no use for deciding if
something exists. Still, in my experience, other than vocabulary or morphology, the matter of syntax usually is highly logical and even if, as you said, there may be no way to proof or contradict an explanatory model eventually, it might still be useful to look for the one that seems most logical for teaching purposes, as it'll be easier to take in for people who prefer understanding how things work (where possible) to learning structures by rote. So regarding my dummy subject theory, I haven't seen a rival theory yet that could convince me, but I'm open to conviction. Edited by ratis on 29 December 2010 at 3:59pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Juаn Senior Member Colombia Joined 5346 days ago 727 posts - 1830 votes Speaks: Spanish* | Message 20 of 44 29 December 2010 at 4:37pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Consider this: ¿Compras cursos de idiomas? Compro libros, pero descargo el audio. But for emphasis I can also reply: ¿Compras cursos de idiomas? Libros compro, pero el audio lo descargo. Will you claim because of this that "libros" is the subject in the above sentence? Let's leave aside for a moment though grammatical and syntactic considerations and review what the definition of subject is: the agent of an action. When I say: Me quema la bebida. The agent is "la bebida" which burns me, the direct object. So far so good. But in: Me gusta el alemán. Who is doing the liking? Sense-wise, it doesn't make sense to claim German is exerting an action over me but rather the meaning of the sentence is that from my volition stems to like German. It is true the grammatical construction in many Indo-European languages works as if it was the thing one likes which acts on one (es gefällt mir, мне нравится), but as Chomsky and his followers have discovered to their chagrin, there is really no consistent, all-encompassing set of rules that can fully describe a language; there is always something that fails to fall within them. English as is often the case is more sensible in its construction: I like German. Subject, verb, object. Making explicit grammar and syntax your guide will result in a terrible use of language, like your "Me gustan bailar y cantar" exemplifies, which even the most uneducated native Spanish speaker would immediately identify as mistaken. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| tractor Tetraglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5454 days ago 1349 posts - 2292 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, Catalan Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 21 of 44 29 December 2010 at 5:02pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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In Me gusta el alemán, alemán is the grammatical subject. German pleases me.
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| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6012 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 22 of 44 29 December 2010 at 8:43pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Of course not -- no-one is claiming that. Furthermore, the lack of verb concordance makes it clear that "libros" is neither object nor predicate, but subject.
Not really, the construction implies that there is no volition in liking. You did not chose to like German, you just found that it agrees with you (there's another one -- te cae bien -- not your choice). Similary, when me gusta esta chica, I didn't chose to make her attractive. In fact, if the girl in question is a good friend's girlfriend, I wouldn't want to fancy her, and if I could chose, I'd chose not to! So none of this really applies to "me llevo". You can argue logic all you want, but all that matters is what actually happens. If people put the infinitive after the time period ("mucho tiempo", "horas", whatever) then they must unconsciously bind the two together. If they don't, they don't. Looking in the Corpus del Español for [vr*] [pp*] lleva gives only 13 matches, and none of them are the "llevar tiempo" type. [vr*] = any verb in the infinitive, with or without enclitic object pronouns [pp*] = all personal pronouns (including subjects and both direct and indirect objects.)
Sorry, s_allard's mistake wasn't the result of explicit grammar per se, but because of a gap in his knowledge of grammar. By pointing out that error, you have given s_allard an opportunity to understand grammar better, and it would be silly for anyone to abandon grammar rather than just fix his or her mistakes when they are discovered. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Merv Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5274 days ago 414 posts - 749 votes Speaks: English*, Serbo-Croatian* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 23 of 44 29 December 2010 at 9:07pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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I am just a beginner in Spanish, but it would be more logical to me to say me lleva mucho tiempo prepararse.
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| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5431 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 24 of 44 30 December 2010 at 12:03am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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This is quite an interesting discussion, even if I feel it is getting needlessly complicated. If we step back a bit and ask ourselves what is grammar, I suggest that there are two definitions:
1. A set of rules that users intuitively follow to generate utterances that are generally perceived to be correct. 2. A terminology and a set of theoretical principles by which we can describe and explain the construction of generally accepted utterances. These are two very different things. All users can spontaneously produce acceptable utterances (within the range of acceptable variation) and yet be unable to produce a technical explanation of what they do. By the same token, linguists and grammarians can invent very different grammars that purport to explain what people do intuitively. How does this apply here? The OP gave us the following utterance with translation: Sí, me lleva mucho tiempo prepararme. Yes, it takes me a lot of time to get ready. And then asks why it is not "me llevo" and whether the subject is really prepararme with the indirect object me. I'll disregard the first question because I want to concentrate on explaining the given construction (I suspect that llevarse may not the best verb with this meaning of need and a form like "Necesito mucho tiempo para prepararme" is probably better.) Let's look at the original sentence with literal translation: Sí, me lleva mucho tiempo prepararme. Yes, (to/for me) takes much time (to prepare myself). How do we explain what is going on here? Obviously, this is where opinions diverge. I readily admit the existence of multiple grammars or explanatory systems. So the idea of a dummy subject is certainly possible. The reason I prefer another approach is that I see a structural analogy with similar constructions in Spanish plus the well-known characteristic of very flexible word order in Spanish. I wonder if the problem here is that the notion of subject is perhaps vague. As I use it here, subject is basically what determines the verb form when we say that in Spanish the verb agrees with the number and person of subject. Note here that person does mean necessarily human being. Nouns, verbs and all sorts of groupings can be subjects. This of course includes things like infinitives including pronominal verbs. One often used characteristic of Spanish the inverted subject. Basically, since word order is so flexible, one can move things around. So the following forms are equivalent: Es peligroso asomarse al exterior Asomarse al exterior es peligroso Mucha gente vive aquí Aquí vive mucha gente Vive aquí mucha gente In all these forms the verbs es and vive have subjects that are either in front or behind. We also know that Spanish renders certain English verbs with a construction that is a bit unusual in the form of indirect object + verb + (noun, verb or group). I'm deliberately not using the word subject here. The most common verb here is gustar, as in: Me gustan los libros. This is ususally translated as "I like books". This is where things get complicated. What is the subject? On a purely grammatical level, it is "los libros". On a philosophical level, it could be something else. We say it's the subject for two reasons. First, the verb agrees in number with los libros. Secondly, the sentence could be rewritten. Los libros me gustan All of this leads may simply to say that the original example is simply an inverted form of: Prepararme me lleva mucho tiempo. To me this is a simple and elegant explanation. But obviously it's not the only one. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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