[ola] Re: Grammar Question!
- From: Thomas Hinkle <thinkle@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: ola@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 30 Jan 2014 19:45:57 -0500
I can't find any evidence to confirm the observation you're trying to
explain.
My go-to tool for this kind of question is
ngrams<https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=me+cae+bien%2Cme+cae+mal%2Cno+me+cae+bien&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=21&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cme%20cae%20bien%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cme%20cae%20mal%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cno%20me%20cae%20bien%3B%2Cc0>,
but alas I can't come up with any queries to put into ngrams that yield
something useful. With the less precise google searches, the results I'm
seeing suggest that preposing the subject is more common in both cases.
"ella me gusta" -> 41.5 million results vs. "me gusta ella" -> 1.6 million
results (26:1)
"ella me cae bien" -> 6.6 million results vs. "me cae bien ella" -> 717k
results (9:1)
"María me gusta" -> 1.35 million vs. "me gusta María" 247k (5.5:1)
"María me cae bien" -> 239k vs. "me cae bien María" 27k (8.9:1)
The google search is imprecise, so it's possible that those results are
marred by sentences that *end* with "María" followed by sentences that
start with "me cae bien," but nonetheless, if there were a difference in
the usage of the two expressions, I would expect it to show up, and it
doesn't seem to (preposing with "me cae" holds steady at 9:1, but the
results with "me gusta" are inconsistent).
Perhaps what's happening is L1 interference ("I like") in your own
production of "me gusta" forms is making you tend to postpose the subject
in those expressions but not in others w/o a clear English equivalent. Or
maybe not. At any rate, I highly recommend using google ngrams and even
bare google searches to check linguistic intuitions, especially in a second
language. Even in my English-teaching life, I frequently find my intuitions
about language are wrong -- the point is, you really can't trust your gut
sense of things, as it is likely to be highly idiosyncratic.
When it comes to word order, the things I usually teach (when I'm teaching
such things), are:
1. Word order is far more flexible in Spanish. I have a chart somewhere
that shows the frequency for all six possible core word orders (SVO, SOV,
VOS, VSO, OVS, OSV). They all show up in Spanish, and some of the ones that
feel more exotic to us come up quite frequently in subordinate clauses, so
they tend to start showing up when students begin doing more sophisticated
reading. In speech the one oddball thing students may see is that when the
object is preposed (OSV, OVS), it's pretty common to hear DO proclitic
doubling (e.g. "A Ramón yo lo vi ayer.") though this is non-standard.
2. I sometimes teach the
topic-comment<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic%E2%80%93comment>or
theme-rheme structure as a way of explaining word-order variation. The
obvious reason to move "Javier" to the start of the sentence is if you've
been talking about Javier. I often do this with a series of question/answer
pairings. For example, in the below pairings, I've labelled Topic (T) and
Comment (C) in brackets:
¿A quién le gusta Javier? --> [T: Javier le gusta ] [C: a María.]
¿Quién le gusta a María? --> [T: A maría le gusta] [C: Javier.]
¿Qué opina María de Javier? --> [T: A maría Javier] [C: le gusta.]
Of course, in an OWLish environment, I don't typically teach these things
explicitly, but I do try to model different word orders as part of modeling
authentic language rather than scripted language, and with so much emphasis
on questions, all these different sorts of questions are likely to come up.
3. I also teach word order together with intonation. If I'm allowing myself
English (for whatever reason), I would be likely to translate the sentences
above using italics in English to show the ways we would use our wider
range of intonation in English to communicate the same thing a Spanish
speaker would communicate their wider range of word orders.
Javier le gusta a María. *Maria *likes Javier.
A María le gusta Javier. Maria likes *Javier.*
A María Javier le gusta. María *likes *Javier.
If you want to geek out on this stuff and all other things linguistic, I
highly recommend M. Stanley Whitney's *Spanish/English
Contrasts*<http://www.amazon.com/Spanish-English-Contrasts-Second-Edition/dp/0878403817/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1391128688&sr=8-1&keywords=spanish+english+contrasts>as
an accessible but thorough linguistics text for Spanish teachers.
Tom
On Fri, Jan 24, 2014 at 3:11 PM, Tess Siemer <tess.siemer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> So, in my 3/4 class yesterday we were talking about a common speech error
> and I couldn't explain the "why" to them other than it sounding correct or
> incorrect and I told them I would try to find out...
>
> Here are our two sentences - we began by talking about the difference in
> saying "me cae bien" and "me gusta" when talking about someone:
> Javier me cae bien.
> Me gusta Alma.
>
> They want to know why the person's name comes first in the first example
> and second in the second example, grammatically. Any answers out there?
>
> Thanks!
> Tess
>
--
Thomas Hinkle
English & Spanish Department Coordinator
Innovation Academy Charter School
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