"Extra" pronouns? What gives?

By Sigrid Lee

Have you ever noticed that Italians use a little pronoun even after they have already mentioned the noun in a sentence? Have you ever thought it was either bad grammar or just a regional habit? Or maybe you never even noticed an "extra" object was there (easy to do if you aren't following along with the transcript).

I certainly thought these seemingly extra pronouns were a kind of clutter, little words people would just add through habit. 🔎 But then I took a closer look. I discovered that they are not clutter at all. They are connectors.

In conversation, Italians often put the object first and refer back to it with a pronoun. These little pronouns aren't thrown into a sentence at random. They appear because the speaker has changed the usual order of the sentence.

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Let's look at an example from the popular series La compagnia del cigno, where Maestro Marioni is being hard on a new violinist in his conservatory orchestra. Note the position of the object (le note) in this straightforward word order. The object comes after the verb — standard.

Dovresti sapere le note a memoria, no (you should know the notes by heart, right)?

But Maestro Marioni puts the object first, a very common practice:

Le note le dovresti sapere a memoria, no (you should know the notes by heart, right)?

When the object (in this case le note — the notes) gets moved away from its usual position after the verb, an object pronoun referring to the object is used to keep the connection clear. It's kind of like an echo. It's a reminder of the object that's already part of the sentence.

(In the video, you may hear Maestro Marioni hesitate: "Le, le note..." This first le is just a false start, something we often do in spontaneous speech.)

Sei rigido. E poi non guardare lo spartito, no? Le, le note le dovresti sapere a memoria, no?

You're stiff. And then, don't look at the score, OK? The, the notes, you should know them by heart, no?

Captions 50-52, La compagnia del cigno S1 EP4 La scelta di Barbara - Part 3
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➡️ Here's what we're talking about:

What is it? An object pronoun.
What is happening? The object and the verb are separated because the speaker has changed the usual word order.
Why is the pronoun there? It helps maintain the connection and keeps the listener oriented.
How can we think of it? Like an echo.

In the following example, a fisherman is talking about his world, the sea. He doesn't use the usual word order, subject - verb - object. He starts with the object, il mare (the sea). Since the object is no longer in its usual place, the speaker quite naturally echoes that object with a pronoun that represents it. We could say it's a way of orienting the listener.

Eh, il mare tu lo scegli come unica fidanzata, poi te la sposi e ci resti tutta la vita.

Uh, you choose the sea like a sole girlfriend, then you marry her and you stay your whole life.

Captions 65-66, Dottor Pitrè e le sue storie - Part 2
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He could have said,

Tu scegli il mare come unica fidanzata... (you choose the sea like a sole girlfriend...)

But he chose to begin with the word that came to mind first: il mare (the sea).

This is normal practice in Italian. And now that you know it's normal, you will start hearing and seeing it more and more often.

This next example is a slightly more complex sentence. Author Valeria Parrella could have said, using the usual word order:

... non puoi fare una fotografia (...you can't take a photograph).

She switched the word order around quite a bit. In the second half of the sentence, she did put the subject first (tu), but she followed it with the object (una fotografia), not the verb. So the pronoun la is a kind of grammatical signpost that helps you navigate a sentence whose word order has taken a different route.

Se non ci metti la luce tu una fotografia non la puoi proprio fare.

If you don't add light to it, you really can't take a photograph.

Captions 20-21, Romanzo Italiano Campania - Part 6
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In this next example, we see 2 instances of the "echo" pronoun. Note that in the second instance, the echo pronoun comes before the actual object!

E il peperoncino come lo usi te [tu]? -Quasi dappertutto lo uso il peperoncino.

And how do you use hot peppers? -I use hot peppers just about everywhere.

Caption 32, In cucina con Antonino Episodio 3 - La mamma
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What have we learned in this lesson? In a nutshell:

Italian word order can be much more flexible than what we are used to in English, but it is not a free-for-all. You can put words in a different order, but at the same time, you use little grammatical signals to guide the listener through the sentence. In this case, that signal is an object pronoun.

Thanks for reading this lesson. We hope you have learned something, or maybe just understood something in a new way. Write to us at [email protected]. We love to hear from you... and a human will reply!