Could someone please explain sentence structure with reflexive verbs (esp. idiomatic)

I really struggle knowing just where to put these verbs (in every kind of sentence), and it gets worse when they're idiomatic...

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Permalink Reply by Neil Coffey on October 11, 2010 at 4:01pm

Verbs don't really have special "sentence structure" as such compared to other verbs -- by any chance could you give an exampl of what you mean?

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Permalink Reply by Lynn on October 11, 2010 at 5:55pm

I see what you mean. I dug a little deeper and I'm fairly confident in placing them. However, I have another question :) How do you know when to use the idiomatic and when to use the plain verb? I understand some of them must be used reflexively or else the meaning is lost. This sounds kind of stupid, but if you take a sentence like: Les enfants s'amusent bien au zoo, why would you use the refelxive? Couldn't you say: les enfants amusent...? maybe you can't, but I don't know.

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Permalink Reply by Neil Coffey on October 13, 2010 at 5:11am

OK, in many cases like this, it depends on what the "basic" meaning is of the verb in French. So in this case, you can envisage amuser has a basic meaning of "to amuse, entertain". So if you just say ils amusent then it means "they entertain..." -- in other words, the sentence would be incomplete because you haven't said who or what is being entertained. So in this case, s'amuser to a French person has a more or less literal meaning of "to entertain oneself", "to be entertained".

On thing that might help is to bear in mind that as well as having the "self" meaning, a "reflexive" verb can often have a passive meaning too (the equivalent of "to be ...ed").

Obviously there's a translating issue, because for Ils s'amusent you'd often use a different phrase in English such as have fun, have a good time (though note enjoy themselves which keeps the reflexive idea). But this is largely a translation issue-- as far as French is concerned, there's a notion of "self".

One thing that might help is that when ever there's a vague notion of "self" or "each other" in English, French very strongly tends to use a reflexive verb.