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Saturday, August 2, 2025

Lends itself

 I was thinking that most reflexives in English are true reflexives, in that the object and the subject of the verb are the same, like "I dislike myself."  In Spanish, there are many uses of the reflexive grammatical construction in which the meaning itself is not reflexive at all. It can be impersonal, pseudo-passive, the reflexive that just makes a verb intransitive rather than transitive, the reflexive of consumption (eating or drinking or smoking all of something), reciprocal. 

But I found the construction "lends itself" that is not truly reflexive, but more like an impersonal intransitive construction. There are some other ones like this, "manifests itself" means show up as, not something that literally manifests itself, performing that action on itself reflexively.  

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