он сло м ал *се бе* но гу v s. он сло мал ногу

[R. M. Cleminson]

The Russian National Corpus is usually the best place to turn if you want quick (but not instantaneous) answers.  It is a genuine corpus and allows relatively sophisticated searching.  This suggests that overall there is an almost 10:1 ratio in favour of сломать [in any grammatical form] ногу over сломать себе ногу.  If one restricts the search to texts written before 1900, however, the frequency is almost equal.  In no case is there any perceptible difference in meaning.

This shows a very clear shift in usage, which may at least in part be accounted for by the fact that the себе is redundant (unless there is any doubt about whose leg you have broken).  It is, however, clear that the pattern from which Russian is moving away is one that is still obligatory in many languages: je me suis cassé la jambe, zlomil som si nohu.  English too, though it uses a different construction, prefers to have a pronoun: I have broken my leg.  (It is possible to say "I have broken a leg", but I am sure, without having done a statistical survey, that this is much less common, and only possible because you have a choice of two: you can't say "*I have broken a nose" if the nose in question is your own.)

And another thought.  Could the apparent shift of usage at the beginning of the twentieth century explain, in Mayakovsky's Баня:

Ундертон: Губы красила.
Фосфорическая женщина: Кому?
Ундертон: Да себе ж!

with Miss Undertone representing the younger generation and the Phosphorescent Woman, despite her 21st-century origins, adhering to the older norm?



----- Originálna správa -----
Odosielateľ: "Kjetil Rå Hauge" <k.r.hauge at ILOS.UIO.NO>
Komu: SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu
Dátum: štvrtok, január 20, 2011 03:35:40
Predmet: Re: [SEELANGS] он слом ал *себе* но гу v s. он сло мал ногу

On 19. jan.. 2011, at 23.11, Emily Saunders wrote:

> Дорогие SEELANGовцы!
>
> I'm hoping for a quick answer to the question of which is better and  
> is there any difference.  I find both on a Google search.
>
> Я сломала себе ногу.
> Я сломала ногу.
>

Those in search of more than a quick answer might like to take a look  
at Ljiljana Šarić: "On the semantics of the ‘dative of  
possession’ in the Slavic languages: An analysis on the basis of  
Russian, Polish, Croatian/Serbian and Slovenian examples", Glossos 3  
(2002), available here: <http://www.seelrc.org/glossos/issues/3/saric.pdf 
 >, and the bibliography in it.

> Спасибо заранее!
>
> Emily Saunders
>
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-- 
---
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Tel. +47/22856710, fax +1/5084372444

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