This one has me baffled. The question was asked to translate "She touched his shoulder." In this English sentence "his shoulder" is a direct object, so I figured there were a couple of possible answers. A direct object pronoun could be used - my understanding is that this would be optional in Spanish. And the possessive pronoun for shoulder could be personal or definite. So I figured "Ella [lo] tocó su/el hombro." However, the answer given was "Ella le tocó el hombro." My question is: why the indirect object pronoun "le"? The only reason I can think of is that maybe because the definite article is used with body parts in Spanish some way to clarify that the touch is being directed towards someone else is required, and maybe this sentence could be thought of in English as "She [gave a touch to] his shoulder."
↧
