The Formal Properties of Non Paradigmatic SE Borealis

Revista de Linguistica y Lenguas Aplicadas, 2013

This work revolves around a very peculiar set of Spanish verbs (‘caer[se]’, ‘morir[se]’, ‘tropezar[se]’ and ‘encallar[se]’), which optionally allow the clitic ‘se’ without any significant change of meaning. These verbs do not enter the transitive-inchoative alternation (i.e. they are non-anticausative). Besides, the presence of the clitic has little semantic contribution, if any at all. They are problematic because they cannot be integrated in existing analyses that account for other instances of pronominal verbs like anticausatives and reflexives. What I propose in this work is that these verbs optionally allow a complement low applicative phrase. Moreover, the clitic ‘se’ is thought of as a nominal item. This allows the integration of these verbs in broader analyses of pronominal verbs that consider the clitic a nominal item (whether argumental or expletive-like).

2011

Looking at Modern European Portuguese under a generative perspective, we will discuss the agreement pattern of pronominal passive constructions, i.e., transitive structures with the pronominal clitic se in which the logical object of the sentence agrees in number and person with the inflected verb of the clause. Following Martins (2005), we argue that the clitic pronoun se plays a role of mediator between the object and the verb in the process of agreement. Our proposal departs from Martins' analysis since we ascribe a different semantic interpretation to a particular kind of structure with the clitic se, which superficially differs from pronominal passives only by not showing agreement between the verb and the object.

2015

The main source of evidence for this contrast comes from an inalienable possession interpretation of a body part available in the Passse and Impse constructions, but not in the periphrastic passive. Based on the conclusion that there is a projected implicit argument in Spec,Voice in Passse and Impse constructions, we explore consequences for other parts of BP grammar. We also briefly touch upon BP's status as a partial null subject language in contrast to Spanish, a consistent null subject language which also has these se constructions. These se constructions in BP, we suggest, are a residue of an early BP grammar when it still was a consistent null subject language. This paper is structured as follows: in section 2, we review diagnostics from the literature for implicit agentive arguments. We will see that Passse, Impse, and the

This presentation will discuss the many uses of se and will debunk two myths about Spanish grammar: that there exist as separate entities (1) "reflexive" verbs and (2) an "accidental/unplanned-occurrence/no-fault" se. Instead, we will see that these "constructions" are merely labels, useful perhaps, but ultimately misleading and an impediment to a fuller, richer and more holistic grasp of Spanish grammar.

2015

This paper presents a diachronic account of the syntax of subjects in Portuguese by comparing three different constructions – active, canonical passives and SE-constructions – relating the change in the position of subjects to the loss of V2. In the V2 grammar, in which the pre-verbal position is associated with fronted elements, and non-fronted subjects remain in post-verbal position, we see the same patterns of word order in SE-constructions as in active and canonical passive sentences; in the (X)SVO grammar, in which the subject is associated with the preverbal position and the fronted elements occupy the left periphery of the clause, active and canonical passives show a significant increase of pre-verbal subjects, whereas SE-constructions remain alike with respect to word order. We interpret this result as evidence for analyzing the internal argument of SE-constructions as a complement rather than a subject. Resumo: Este artigo apresenta uma análise diacrônica para a sintaxe dos sujeitos em português através da comparação de três construções diferentes – ativas, passivas e construções com SE – relacionando a mudança na posição dos sujeitos à perda de V2. Na gramática V2, na qual a posição pré-verbal está associada a elementos topicalizados, e sujeitos não topicalizados permanecem na posição pós-verbal, encontramos os mesmos padrões de ordem nas construções com SE, nas ativas e nas passivas; na gramática (X)SVO, na qual a posição do sujeito está associada a uma posição pré-verbal e os elementos topicalizados ocupam a periferia à esquerda da sentença, as construções ativas e passivas apresentam um aumento significativo no percentual de sujeitos pré-verbais, ao passo que as construções com SE permanecem estáveis com relação à ordem. Interpretamos esse resultado como evidência para analisar o argumento interno das construções com SE como sendo um complemento e não um sujeito.

Borealis, 2019

Chains of auxiliary verbs in Spanish allow for the reconceptualization of well-known grammatical problems under the light of understudied structures. In this paper we will deal with issues regarding the position of subjects in declarative and interrogative sentences featuring auxiliary chains. It will become immediately evident that the dichotomy between pre-and post-verbal subjects results inadequate to provide adequate characterisations for the Spanish cases, in contrast to the situation in English. This is so because post-verbal subjects may appear, a priori, to the right of each auxiliary in a chain. These new data, which have received little attention, constitute a challenge for standard hypotheses about the position of subjects in Spanish. RESUMEN. Las secuencias de verbos auxiliares en español permiten plantearse problemas gramaticales bien conocidos en el marco de estructuras poco estudiadas. En este trabajo abordamos la cuestión de la posición de los sujetos en oraciones declarativas e interrogativas en estas cadenas de verbos auxiliares. Es inmediatamente evidente que la dicotomía entre sujetos preverbales y posverbales no es adecuada para tratar los casos del español, en contraste con lo que sucede en inglés, puesto que los sujetos pospuestos pueden aparecer a priori a la derecha de cada verbo auxiliar en una cadena. Estos nuevos datos, muy poco tratados en la bibliografía, son un desafío para las hipótesis estándar sobre la posición del sujeto en español. Palabras clave. cadenas de verbos auxiliares; sujetos; nichos; inversión 1. Introduction The possibility of having sequences of auxiliary verbs creates so-called auxiliary chains (RAE-ASALE, 2009; Bravo et al., 2015 and related works). In these chains there are positions between auxiliaries and between the last auxiliary and the main verb, where non-verbal elements can appear. Following Ross (1991), we will refer to these positions as niches. In the following example, we have marked niches with square brackets:

Borealis – An International Journal of Hispanic Linguistics

Following Oca (1914), this article argues that passive and impersonal se constructions in Spanish are regular transitive constructions where the pronominal clitic seis the argumental subject. Several arguments (secondary predication, non-argumental predicates, control and obviation, anaphora binding, active morphology or its alignment with overt nominative pronouns, among others)show that (i)bothconstructions are active structures, (ii)despite what agreement facts might suggest, in both the internal argument of the verb is not the subject but the direct object throughout the derivation, (iii) se is the active nominative pronominal subject of the construction. We argue that the alleged ‘special’ properties of passive-se are not construction-specific but follow from the lexical specifications of se agreeing with Tense as a quirky subject.

Revista Diadorim

O objetivo deste artigo é investigar a sintaxe do Português Brasileiro (PB), desenvolvendo uma proposta unifcada para os casos de orações com sujeitos referenciais e não-referenciais, por um lado, e de orações do tipo tópico-sujeito, com ordem VS, com sujeito de terceira pessoa e interpretação genérica sem o pronome ‘se', com verbos existenciais e meteorológicos, em que, por hipótese, a posição de sujeito é preenchida por um sintagma locativo (temporal/ espacial) manifesto ou nulo. Por hipótese, nesses contextos, o sujeito é preenchido por um DP/ pronome (nulo ou manifesto) com interpretação locativa (espacial/ temporal). Argumentamos que é possível entender os fatos relevantes se analisarmos o sistema pronominal/flexional do PB como sendo cindido em dois subsistemas: um, composto pela primeira e segunda pessoas, que são inerentemente defnidas/referenciais; e o outro, constituído pela terceira pessoa, que é subespecifcada para o traço defnido/referencial. A proposta que defende...

Journal of Latin Linguistics, 2015

As the title suggests, this study adopts a functional framework, in which the lexicon of predicates is taken to be the predetermining factor in their syntactic conditions of use: the number of the obligatory elements required and their lexical and functional characteristics. Accordingly, this paper will begin by addressing the problematic issue of the distinction between constituents obligatorily demanded by the predicate for the grammaticality of the construction (arguments) and elements which are not necessary for this (satellites). The issue arises not only from a general perspective, but also in specific cases, such as that of three Latin predicates that share —among other things— a semantic notion of “permanence”: maneo, permaneo and remaneo. At the same time, and given that these verbs are also linked by the mechanism of preverbation, it is essential to examine also whether the presence of different preverbs modifies the syntactic characteristics of structures forming the verbs, as well as the potential semantic differences between them. For this reason, the current session consists of two different but closely interrelated blocks. In the first section I will begin with a study of material drawn from use-based lexicons and corpus analysis of the verbs in question, with the aim of facilitating a first approach to the differentiation (i) of the semantic content that they can have, and (ii) of their possible general complementation patterns. It is in this part of the investigation that a fuller assessment will be made of the problems that arise in the determination of the possible argumental nature of some constituents and the question of absolute verbal uses; this point is seen with greater complexity given the proximity between the content of a locative, existential and/or copulative nature found in various stative verbs. The study of lexical features of the various constituents with which the verb combines, the comparison with the behaviour of other (quasi-)synonymous predicates, and the importance of pragmatic information, will be mechanisms to help identify the syntactic-semantic nature of each case, without the existence of ambiguous cases being possible to rule out entirely. The study of syntactic-semantic differences between the simple verb and its corresponding compounds will be addressed in the second section. For this purpose, various procedures of analysis will serve to confirm the possible differences proposed thus far; these procedures will be, essentially, the study (a) of the expression of the duration of permanence, and (b) of the contexts of co-occurrence of simple verbs and verbs with a preverb. Differences will not always be clear, which suggests a possible neutralization of the expected distinctions in some cases, in such a way that the language is seen to be compelled occasionally to draw on additional lexical and grammatical means for explicitly specifying these presumed distinctions. References Baños, José M., Cabrillana, Concepción, Torrego, M. Esperanza & de la Villa, Jesús (eds.) (2003), Praedicatiua. Complementación en griego y en latín, Anejo 53 de Verba, Santiago de Compostela, Universidad de Santiago de Compostela. Database REGLA (“Rección y complementación en griego y latín” [“Corpus of government and complementation on Greek and Latin”]): < http://www.uam.es/proyectosinv/regula/index.html>. Dik, Simon C. (1989), The Theory of Functional Grammar. Part I: The structure of the clause, Dordrecht, Foris. Pinkster, Harm (2015), Oxford Latin Syntax. I: The Simple Clause, preliminary version (accessed on 02/2015). Torrego, M. Esperanza, Baños, José M., Cabrillana, Concepción & Méndez Dosuna, Julián (eds.) (2007), Praedicatiua II. Esquemas de complementación verbal en griego antiguo y latín, Zaragoza, Universidad de Zaragoza. Van Valin, Robert D. & LaPolla, Randy J. (1997), Syntax: structure, meaning and function, Cambridge, CUP.

Research in Corpus Linguistics, 2021