English Translation
Tom set fire to Mary’s house.
As I understand it, le is redundant in this type of sentence. If that’s the case, I wonder if it’s a regional thing, as the author of this sentence is from Chile.
I don’t doubt we could get away with leaving out “le” in a sentence like this in real life. At the same time, it likely boils down to how pedantic we want to be about “perfect grammar”.
A course I’m using is Accelerated Spanish, and Timothy Moser insists that, though “le” is redundant, it’s still necessary for a grammatically correct sentence with an indirect object. He hasn’t said why he’s so sure, but there you go. Another course I’m using hasn’t said either way, but always inserts “le” into any sentence where there’s an indirect object, even when the object is specified elsewhere in the sentence.
I’d love to know why grammarians insist on this, and wonder if it has anything to do with how synalepha can obscure the indirect object under the right conditions… It’s certainly one of the reasons I don’t like using robot voices, they simply don’t catch it.
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I know there are some cases where le is required, such as when the indirect object is a simple personal pronoun (“Tom le dio un regalo a ella”), but maybe it’s best to always add a le, to be on the safe side.