Le in ándale, córrele -- particle, leísmo, other?

M

mellow-yellow

Senior Member
English - USA
I just spent 15 minutes reading every forum post for ándale but still haven't found a satisfactory grammatical explanation of Le in these primarily Mexican expressions: ándale, córrele, dale.

Some posts refer to the le as leísmo:

http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=2447875
Por leísmo se entiende el uso del pronombre le, en lugar de lo o la. "Le" hace referencia a un objeto indirecto y "lo" y "la" a un objeto directo.
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but in another thread, one poster called it a particle. (For reference, in English, particles like "off" in "call off the meeting" are quite common in phrasal verbs.)

http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=2055336
Ándale no tiene que ver con dale. LE es una partícula que se usa mucho en México, en especial en los imperativos, para darles un cierto matiz de apremio, de cordialidad o de aprobación, en fin, según el caso.
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Grammatically speaking, what part of speech is Le in these expressions?
 
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    • Fifteen minutes? I've been searching for years!

    The closest I've ever come to an explanation is that in Latin America the neuter pronoun 'le' is used in familiar speach in several regions, giving your 'ándale, córrale, córrele',etc. But I'm still unconvinced, as 'standard' Spanish doesn't use 'ándalo' and suchlike. Apparently, this same redundant neuter 'le' is heard in common speach in Argentina and other countries in expressions such as 'se me le perdió' and 'se me le ocurrió', where in the Spanish of Spain I've never heard it.
     
    Hi mellow-yellow

    I'd say that the particle explanation makes a lot of sense for both ándale and córrele, at least. They can't work as a standard pronoun (indirect object in the third person) with the meaning the verbs have for obvious reasons. They use it in Mexico and I guess they feel it adds something to the regular meaning of the verb even if it's not more than a slight nuance. In Spanish, this also happens with many pronominal constructions of verbs in which the pronoun is in fact not standing for anyone but just adding a different nuance to the meaning or even completely changing the verb meaning. Here, you can't ascribe it a syntactical function, it's just a morpheme that change the meaning even though it needs be constructed as if it were a real pronoun (in agreement with the subject). In short, it's a morpheme that adopts the form as said pronoun and adds some meaning.

    As for dale, well, here it could be interpreted as an indirect object pronoun. At least this is one of the usages we utilize around here: with a convenient or figurative omitted direct object and stating the indirect object as a suffixed pronoun.
     
    No es siempre lo mismo entra que éntrale., ¿cómo lo haces? que ¿cómo le haces?

    Tal vez te sirva leer esto.
     
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