Abstract
This article provides an overview of Spanish SE, covering the main empirical facts, analyses and theoretical issues that it raises, and exploring the prospects to unify all uses –which are over a dozen in the literature– under one same object that keeps its surface properties invariable. We will show that it is almost inescapable to propose that SE is associated to two types of objects, defective arguments and defective verbal heads; both objects share the property of not introducing referentially independent DPs, which can be argued to be the result of the grammaticalisation of a reflexive element in contemporary Spanish. The chapter proposes that a treatment of SE as a projection introduced high in the clausal structure and acting as an agreement locus can be a fruitful way to unify all uses of SE.
Highlights
SE has been viewed as an impoverisher of the verbal structure, something that will be a common trend in the analyses presented and in §3-10, with spurious SE being a rare exception that does not seem to affect the assignment of arguments, aspect or case in the verb
Middles as anticausative SE, not passive SE If we continue the reasoning presented in §8.1, where we argued that the configuration in
SE as a verbal head (3): overview and integration within the system of clitics let us revise how well theories that treat SE as a projection of a verbal head fare with respect to the different types of SE structures. These theories have in their favour a very basic and solid fact about SE, that we focused on in §3 and §4: SE does not appear in any reflexive predicate, but only in verbal predicates that are reflexive; SE does not appear in any anticausative, but only on the verbal ones; the other uses of SE only appear in verbal structures
Summary
Estos libros se les pueden vender bien These books SE them.dat can sell well 'Such books can be sold to them' l. That this cannot be the only reason for (322) to be ungrammatical: auxiliary verbs are supposed not to select their subjects either, but they can combine with a SE that is (in principle) associated to the thematic subject of the subordinate infinitive (Se los puede invitar, 'SE them.acc can invite') From this perspective it is unclear why (322c) or (322d) should not license the subject in the same way, with the inescapable conclusion that auxiliary + infinitive cannot be the same type of syntactic construction as parecer + infinitive.
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