Abstract
Abstract The goal of this paper is to revisit the so-called aspectual se, frequently cited over the last three decades as a new function of reflexive pronouns in Spanish and other languages, which refers to facultative uses of the reflexive pronoun where it has no effect on the valency or diathesis of the verb. I will focus on four empirical problems that such accounts face when dealing with corpus data: the requirement of a delimited object for transitive verbs, the semantic implications of the aspectual function of the reflexive pronoun, the unacceptability of the reflexive pronoun with some predicates, and the fact that these accounts have ignored a number of predicates that also take this facultative reflexive pronoun. I argue that a larger sample of both contexts and verbs, obtained by exhaustively analyzing corpus data, is necessary to improve our understanding of these uses.
Highlights
There is a huge literature on reflexive constructions, both cross-linguistically and within specific languages and language families
I will focus on four empirical problems that such accounts face when dealing with corpus data: the requirement of a delimited object for transitive verbs, the semantic implications of the aspectual function of the reflexive pronoun, the unacceptability of the reflexive pronoun with some predicates, and the fact that these accounts have ignored a number of predicates that take this facultative reflexive pronoun
The COSER data confirm some of the contrasts on which aspectual accounts have relied especially for the consumption verbs comer ‘to eat’ and beber ‘to drink’ but not for the consumption verb tomar ‘to take’, for verbs of spending time, cognition verbs or perception verbs, all of which have been used in aspectual accounts of the RM
Summary
There is a huge literature on reflexive constructions, both cross-linguistically and within specific languages and language families. The reason for this wide interest in reflexives is the functional overload that these elements show in many languages, where the reflexive marker ( RM) can appear in semantically reflexive constructions but can act as a reciprocal marker (see, for instance, the studies presented in Nedjalkov [2007]), a middle marker (see, among others, Kemmer [1993]) or even as a passive or impersonal marker (see Siewierska [1984] for a typological account). I challenge these claims for an aspectual se in Spanish by identifying some empirical problems that arise in connection with it. The final section provides a discussion of the findings and argues for an exhaustive approach to the analysis of these uses
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