elizadeux wrote: ↑Fri Jun 02, 2023 11:00 pm
"the pronominal verbs, they should be taught the same way that phrasal verbs are taught because that is what they ultimately are"
I can see this from a couple different points of view. When I was very young (3 - 7 or 8 years old), I learned these exactly as you are suggesting. I was taught "como se dice..." (sorry about the missing accents, I know how to do these on a mac, but not this PC) , "se habla espanol," "me llamo," and "me voy." At no point, did I ever wonder "what does se mean?" or "what does me" mean here? That was just how it was said in Spanish. Punto final.
Exactly, and that's how I started learning English phrasal verbs, and not even as an adult I would dare imagine myself trying to dismember any particular PhV to understand its meaning. This is the kind of topics where language is utterly dogmatic.
elizadeux wrote: ↑Fri Jun 02, 2023 11:00 pm
However, I sometimes approach this a little differently as an adult especially in Duolingo. I might wonder "Huh? Where did that "se" come from? What does it mean?" As we discussed, it often doesn't have one particular meaning. The prenominal verbs are frequently ambiguous and it depends on the context. For example, "what does se ven mean"? They see themselves (maybe in a mirror). They see each other. They're going to see each other later. They look like someone or something. They find/see/imagine themselves in a particular situation. And so on.
As adults we have come to recognize and accept that it is exactly during our adult life that we overcomplicate everything, from learning to relationships. We must now unlearn.
Anyway, the simple truth is, as you have just said, that the "se" doesn't mean anything, there's no way to derive any knowledge from it. Only in really very few cases it denotes, in the stricter sense of the concept, a reflexive action, or grammatically speaking, that case where the subject and the direct object are the same: yo miro al niño jugando vs. yo me miro al espejo. But as I remarked, when you think about this idea, the actual cases in which this happens are really scarce. If I say, me levanto, am I actually picking myself up? Of course not. And what when I say, me acuesto, or me despierto, or so many others seemingly good examples of this so-called reflexivity. The return on investment, to speak in terms of economics, is so low that it makes the effort useless.
elizadeux wrote: ↑Fri Jun 02, 2023 11:00 pm
The prenominal verbs are frequently ambiguous and it depends on the context. For example, "what does se ven mean"? They see themselves (maybe in a mirror). They see each other. They're going to see each other later. They look like someone or something. They find/see/imagine themselves in a particular situation. And so on.
Native Spanish speakers intuitively know which of these are meant depending on the context. Those of us who are still learning Spanish often have to figure out which of the possible meanings are intended. As prenominal verbs often have idiomatic meanings, that complicates things a lot. Idioms are often the hardest thing to learn in other languages.
More than ambiguous it is just that they may have several meanings or acceptions, but this is just the usual case for regular verbs in any language. Check for example how many values the verb cargar has! 27 transitive uses, 12 intransitive, and 7 pronominal. Uf! English, of course, doesn't fall behind I can't think of a good example right now, as most are part of a phrasal verb, like get,however… check this: English word with the most meanings!
elizadeux wrote: ↑Fri Jun 02, 2023 11:00 pm
"I'm focusing on the so-called reflexive verbs, or more specifically, on the concept of reflexivity, which I think should be completely discarded because it introduces another, and unneeded, layer of complexity"
Here's what my grammar book has to say about "so-called reflexive verbs":
"Pronominal verbs (confusingly called reflexive verbs in many traditional grammars) are those which are accompanied by an object pronoun... which is of the same person and number of the verb's subject. Pronominal refers to the form of these verbs, not their meaning... It is misleading to give the name reflexive to this verb form. Reflexive refers to just one of the meanings that a pronominal verb can have. The range of meanings expressed by prenominal verbs is much wider than this, and the relationship between them is sometimes subtle."
From start to finish, spot on!
I am doing a guide for the Italian pronominal verbs and I exactly said that, the name is just a convention, the concept goes beyond. I definitely agree a thousand percent with this, "Pronominal refers to the form of these verbs," and that's the only thing that as students we need to learn, how to work with the form: combine the pronouns, conjugate the verbs, and such. Regarding the meaning, as you rightly said, we just have to check a dictionary and that's it.