Thread: "be responsible for"

Originally Posted by shnuddy

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With all due respect to iCake's Russian version, I think that the usage of себя is not correct here. To me it means that the child was made to wait for himself, which is hard to imagine in real life. I would use его instead of себя.

Formally it is perfectly correct as "себя" refers to the subject of the sentence. But I agree that for the ear of native speaker it can be a bit ambiguous. For the better style I propose to remove reflexive pronoun at all:
Он заставил своего ребёнка целый час ждать возле школы.
Even better:
Он заставил ребёнка целый час ждать возле школы.

Well... if someone needs a literary master-class in Russian...