Why is "Comí hace tres horas." correct?

"Who dares to teach must never cease to learn". John Cotton Dana

As a teacher, I think continuing to learn is just as important as teaching. I try to learn something new everyday, either from my students, from my family, from my colleagues, or from myself.

Yesterday in my Spanish 2 class we were going over the Hace + time + que construction.

Briefly:
1. To express how long something has been going on, in Spanish we use the following expression:
HACE + length of time + QUE + verb in the present tense
Hace dos años que vivo aquí. I have been living here for 2 years.

2. When using the preterit and maybe the imperfect, the "Hace + length of time + que" construction translates into ..."ago."
HACE + length of time + QUE + verb in the past tense
Hace dos años que viví aquí. I lived here 2 years ago.

You can read my actual notes here: Hace que... Hace meaning ago.

Anyway, we were going over examples in class from the www.studyspanish.com website. A site that I highly recommend. It's excellent for grammar review, verb conjugation practice, and pronunciation assistance.

We came across this sentence: I ate three hours ago. The site gave this answer: Comí hace tres horas.
as the correct answer. The answer bothered me. I've always been taught that you can not have two conjugated verbs side by side. Something needs to separate these two verbs, whether it was a word or punctuation. Needless to say, since I couldn't explain to my students why the answer was correct, I told them to ignore it and we'll go over it in the next class. I knew that I had to some research to do, I hate saying... "I don't know why it's right, it just is." UGH, that drives me nuts! I looked on the site, in the textbook for the class, in my supplemental grammar books and I couldn't find an explanation on WHY that sentence structure was OK. Just a bunch of "here it is, learn it."

So, I swallowed my pride and asked the experts on http://www.spanishdict.com/  EXCELLENT resource! I'm pretty sure I'll be back on that site again.

Here's what I learned: (Honestly, something I've never knew and I'm BEYOND excited to share this info!!)

IMPERSONAL HACER (never heard of it, did I tell y'all that?)
The impersonal use of the verb "hacer" allows for two distinct possibilities in regards to syntactic function; namely, it can function either as part of an independent clause or as an adverbial expression:

INDEPENTDENT CLAUSE: Hace tres horas que comí. (this is the format we are used to using)
ADVERBIAL EXPRESSION: Comí hace tres horas. (this is the NEW format, that caused me drama)

SN: An independent clause is a clause that can stand by itself, it's also known as a simple sentence. It contains a SUBJECT and a PREDICATE. An adverbial expression (or in our case) phrase is a term for a group of two or more words that perform the same function as an adverb (modifies the verb).

In the sentence: Comí hace tres horas. the verb hacer combines with tres horas to form an adverbial expression. Look at the examples given to me:

1). Comí anoche. → I ate last night.
2). Comí esta tarde. → I ate this afternoon.
3). Comí hace tres horas. → I ate three hours ago.

Notice how anoche, esta tarde, AND hace tres horas answer the same question and performs the same purpose... to tell us when I ate... for this reason "hace" isn't performing as a verb, it's serving in the role as part of an adverb... therefore we don't have 2 verbs side by side!

Doesn't that make sense!!! It did for me and when we go over it in class, I'll have more examples!


Special thanks to Izanoni from http://www.spanishdict.com/ for that extremely helpful answer!

As always if you need me: email me, facebook me, tweet me, or text me.

Ciao,
MLMoore