Optional se constructions and flavours of applicatives in Spanish

Fabienne Martin; Sudha Arunachalam

doi:10.5565/rev/isogloss.153

Optional se constructions and flavours of applicatives in Spanish

Fabienne Martin
, Sudha Arunachalam

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › Academic › peer-review

Abstract

This paper addresses Spanish optional se constructions, which host a reflexive clitic serving as a non-selected argument in transitive structures (comer(se) la manzana ‘eat.REFL the apple’). On the basis of new experimental data, we argue against the view that in such constructions se is similar to particles of exhaustivity such as up in English. We instead propose that se is a pronoun merged as an argument of a low applicative, conveying a locative relation ‘in(x, y, s)’ between the binder of the reflexive x and the nominative DP y (‘x is in y in s’), or, for a subset of speakers, as an argument of a high applicative, introducing a (direct) experiencer of the verbal event. It is shown how this proposal accounts for the variability in the acceptance of optional se constructions across speakers and verb types as well as for the inferences of enriched or unaided agency, affectedness and counter-expectation that have been argued to be triggered by the se-variant of these constructions.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	1-34
Number of pages	34
Journal	Isogloss
Volume	8
Issue number	4
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.5565/rev/isogloss.153
Publication status	Published - 2022
Externally published	Yes

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2022, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona. All rights reserved.

Funding

We are very grateful to Florian Schäfer and Christopher Piñón for their invaluable feedback and numerous discussions on previous versions of this work. We also thank our three anonymous reviewers and our editor for extremely useful suggestions on the form and content of the previous submission. We also greatly benefit from the feedback of LSRL 51 reviewers and audience, Artemis Alexiadou, Luis García Fernández, Despina Oikonomou, Gabriel Martínez Vera and the participants to the RUESHeL group meetings. We owed to Mora Maldonado (and then MacDonald 2017) the suggestion of a potential link between ‘our’ se and ‘their’ se (looked at in Anvari et al. 2019 and Maldonado et al. 2021). We also thank the participants of our experiments, Louise McNally for helping us to find them, as well as Aurica Kastner, Paula Parra-Miranda and Josep Ausensi for punctual judgements. We are also grateful to Hannah Baker for her help with the experiment, and Jon MacDonald and Chris Piñón for their careful proofreading. Remaining errors are our own responsibility. Fabienne Martin’s research is financially supported by DFG award AL 554/8-1 (Leibniz-Preis 2014) to Artemis Alexiadou and grant agreement No 856421 (LeibnizDream) from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.

Funders	Funder number
Horizon 2020 Framework Programme
European Research Council
the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft	AL 554/8-1, 856421

Keywords

aspectual se
experiencer applicative
high applicative
low applicative
optional se
Spanish
telicity

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10.5565/rev/isogloss.153Licence: CC BY

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title = "Optional se constructions and flavours of applicatives in Spanish",

abstract = "This paper addresses Spanish optional se constructions, which host a reflexive clitic serving as a non-selected argument in transitive structures (comer(se) la manzana {\textquoteleft}eat.REFL the apple{\textquoteright}). On the basis of new experimental data, we argue against the view that in such constructions se is similar to particles of exhaustivity such as up in English. We instead propose that se is a pronoun merged as an argument of a low applicative, conveying a locative relation {\textquoteleft}in(x, y, s){\textquoteright} between the binder of the reflexive x and the nominative DP y ({\textquoteleft}x is in y in s{\textquoteright}), or, for a subset of speakers, as an argument of a high applicative, introducing a (direct) experiencer of the verbal event. It is shown how this proposal accounts for the variability in the acceptance of optional se constructions across speakers and verb types as well as for the inferences of enriched or unaided agency, affectedness and counter-expectation that have been argued to be triggered by the se-variant of these constructions.",

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KW - low applicative

KW - optional se

KW - Spanish

KW - telicity

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Optional se constructions and flavours of applicatives in Spanish

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Funding

Keywords

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