[SEELA NGS] он сл омал *се б е* ногу v s. он сло м ал н огу

[John Dunn]

It occurs to me that another translation of the original phrase might be:

I went and broke my leg.

Presumably the question of intention is unlikely to be relevant with this particular phrase, but might be with other verbs and/or parts of the body.

I have often used Google myself as a quick and easy means of establishing usages, but I have found it less helpful than might be expected.  The statistical data are particularly problematic: if you plough through the different pages, you soon come across what are in effect repetitions, and the examples tend to come from what (to me, at least) is a surprisingly limited range of sources.  And I would hesitate to call Google a corpus: the criteria for selection are for the user (if not the insides of Google's computers) not really transparent and are from the language point of view effectively different for each search.  To continue in the vein of finding useful things for other people to do, there may well be a paper to be written on the precise nature of the language data that Google offers and how these data are to be interpreted. 

John Dunn.
________________________________________
From: SEELANGS: Slavic & East European Languages and Literatures list [SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu] On Behalf Of Alina Israeli [aisrael at AMERICAN.EDU]
Sent: 20 January 2011 16:06
To: SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu
Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] [SEELA NGS] он сл омал  *себ  е* ногу v  s. он сло м ал н огу

The way you put questions would make a good research paper for a
graduate student who would have to spend a year or two in the field,
and look if there are gender/regional/class/age differences.

The current data suggests that in the 19th century they predominantly
used "sebe" and in the 20th predominantly without.

I doubt this is a word that could have any gender based distinction in
the usage. But one never knows. Send you grad students.

AI

Jan 20, 2011, в 5:23 AM, anne marie devlin написал(а):

> Somehow, I don't think that raw statistical data on frequency of use
> gives the answer.  What we need to know is in which contexts they
> are used.  "она сломала ногу" may be 30 times more frequent;
> however, "я сломала себе ногу" is still present, so we need to ask
> in which social context is себе added. Is it found in written or
> spoken data?, is it particular to a region?, is it gender-based/age-
> based/class-based?. Is it a formal/informal situation. Is the
> speaker high/low/equal status to the interlocutor?
> I'm also presuming that the google corpus is a corpus of written
> data, and written and spoken data are often not comparable
> AM
>

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