Me corté el pelo: Why do we say it this way in Spanish?

Here you can read more about verbal reflexivity in Spanish. And while what I want to explain in this article is that these constructions are not semantically reflexive, they are constructed the same way as those that are reflexive. That is, from the perspective of language acquisition, it’s sufficient to know how to form reflexive sentences and to know in which cases we use this construction to refer to actions that someone else performs and not ourselves, in order to use them correctly. What follows in this text until the usage examples is an attempt to explain the why, so we’ll talk about grammar, Latin and such things, so I recommend reading this article only if you like those topics, and if not, skip everything until the last paragraph.

To explain this we have to start by talking about grammatical cases. A grammatical case is a morphological category that indicates the syntactic function or thematic role of a noun, pronoun, adjective, determiner, or article within a sentence. They existed in Proto-Indo-European, in Latin, and exist in many current languages, such as German, Russian, Hungarian, and a very long etcetera. The existence of grammatical cases implies that many words, like nouns, adjectives, pronouns, determiners, or articles are modified (declined) to indicate their relationship with the rest of the words in the sentence. This, besides making the learning of languages that have grammatical cases much more difficult :), especially for those of us who are native speakers of languages that don’t have them, is very useful, because among many other things it provides greater freedom when, for example, emphasizing things in a sentence. Let’s see a simple example. I’m going to use German and English for this example, because in Spanish this example wouldn’t be valid since it’s a language that has vestiges of Latin’s grammatical cases.

The English for torta or pastel is cake. The singular definite article in English is the for any noun because of the grammatical genders in the English language there are only vestiges in pronouns, and the third person singular present indicative of the verb to eat is eats. The German for torta or pastel is Kuchen. German does have grammatical genders, in fact it has 3, masculine, feminine and neuter, and the noun Kuchen is of masculine grammatical gender, meaning that its singular definite article when it’s the grammatical subject, to simplify, is der. The third person singular present indicative of the verb essen (to eat) is isst. So, let’s construct sentences. First let’s put the cake as the grammatical subject in German and English, saying that it’s delicious.

The cake is delicious. La torta/el pastel está rica/o.

Der Kuchen ist lecker. La torta/el pastel está rica/o.

Now let’s put a girl named Laura who eats that cake. In German, due to the existence of grammatical cases, we have to decline der to den, because Kuchen comes to be in accusative case, which corresponds in many cases to the direct object in Spanish, but not always, and the declension of der in accusative is den. In English we don’t need to change anything.

Laura eats the cake. Laura come la torta/el pastel.

Laura isst den Kuchen. Laura come la torta/el pastel.

Now let’s invert the sentence to emphasize the cake over Laura.

The cake eats Laura.

Den Kuchen isst Laura.

If we translate literally, in English la torta o el pastel se come a Laura, but in German Laura eats the cake, because the article der is declined to its accusative form, den, which in this case corresponds to the direct object in Spanish, which is the one who suffers the verbal action. The Spanish translation of that German sentence would be La torta la come Laura. Der Kuchen isst Laura would be the direct translation of the cake eats Laura, where der Kuchen is the grammatical subject and Laura the accusative complement. That’s why grammatical cases, among other things, give greater freedom to make the sentence order more flexible.

I warned at the beginning that I was going to give unnecessary information. In Spanish, grammatical cases don’t exist as such, but there are vestiges of them. And the reason why in Spanish we say things like me operé (I had surgery, literally something like I made the surgery on me myself) derives from functions of the Latin dative. In Latin there existed a possessive dative used to indicate the possessor of something, generally with the verb sum (to be). For example, liber est mihi is translated to current Spanish as tengo un libro (I have a book), but its literal translation would be something like un libro es para mí (a book is for me). There also existed the benefactive or malefactive dative, which indicated the recipient of an action, who could be benefited or harmed by it. Thus, aedificavit domum can be translated as construyó una casa (he built a house) and aedificavit mihi domum as construyó una casa para mí (he built a house for me) or me construyó una casa (he built me a house). These functions of the Latin dative evolved into this construction of current Spanish, in which the possessor of that on which the action is performed is emphasized, and who is, moreover, the beneficiary of the same, over the agent who performs it. That is, the me in me corté el pelo doesn’t have a reflexive value, but rather its value is dative as such: that me doesn’t indicate that I performed the action, but that the action was performed on my hair, an inalienable property, and for my benefit.

So, this construction is used to express actions that occurred on oneself, specifically on the body, but it also has another characteristic: it has the subjective meaning that we ourselves decided or gave authorization for the action to be carried out. And the clarification is valid because, for example, if we use the impersonal plural in this construction we eliminate that subjective meaning. Thus, if I say me corté el pelo it’s understood that I decided it, I went to the hairdresser and asked them to cut it, but if I say me cortaron el pelo I’m implying that the haircut was done without my permission. Or if I say me operé I’m implying that I participated in the decision to carry out the surgery, but if I say me operaron whoever listens to me will understand rather that, for example, it was an urgent procedure at a moment when I wasn’t in a condition to decide. On the other hand, this construction follows the principle of linguistic economy: it’s much shorter to say me corté el pelo than to say un peluquero me cortó el pelo (a hairdresser cut my hair).

Having seen all this, let’s look at some examples. As we said above, this construction is used to express actions that someone else performs, almost always on our body, with the subjective meaning that it has our consent or that it was our decision for the action to be carried out. So, for example, we say me vacuné (I got vaccinated), me tatué (I got a tattoo), me saqué sangre (I had blood drawn), me arreglé los dientes (I had my teeth fixed). There are actions that can be performed by oneself or not, like me depilé (I got waxed/I waxed myself): a person can wax themselves, in which case me has reflexive value, or have another person wax them, in which case me acquires this dative value. Regarding its use, as I said above, the construction is the same as that of pronominal verbs: me depilé, te depilaste, se depiló, nos depilamos, os depilasteis, se depilaron. Whether the construction is reflexive or has dative value will depend, as we have seen, on the agent. When it’s possible for it to be reflexive. Because no, I can confirm for you, Spanish speakers don’t perform surgeries on ourselves.