Reflexive SE with first and second person plural verb forms: A corpus study of spoken Valencian Catalan varieties

Abstract

This paper presents a corpus study of 1st and 2nd person plural verbs and their reflexive clitics in a sample of spoken Valencian Catalan varieties. Previous studies have observed that the reflexive clitic SE, which standardly appears with 3rd person verb inflection, can co-occur with verbs marked for 1st and 2nd person plural in some varieties of Spanish and Catalan. With respect to the latter language, it has been mentioned that the phenomenon is especially extensive in the Valencian Catalan varieties. By means of an examination of data from the corpus Parlars it will be shown that even within Valencian Catalan, there is considerable variation with respect to the following factors: (i) whether SE is used with 2nd person only, 1st and 2nd person, or none of the two specifications; (ii) whether SE is the only form or whether it alternates with proto-typical 1st and 2nd person plural reflexives (1PL mos and 2PL vos), and (iii) whether the first person plural reflexive mos can be ‘doubled’ by SE (mo(s) se). The data indicate that SE can be the result of processes in different components of grammar: in phonology, as the result of a reduction operation, in morphology as the result of the elimination of a person feature, or in the lexicon as a feature bundle that fully lacks person.