@article{044d59800797409583bd14c5f288314a,
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.",
keywords = "Spanish, aspectual se, experiencer applicative, high applicative, low applicative, optional se, telicity",
author = "Fabienne Martin and Sudha Arunachalam",
note = "Funding Information: We are very grateful to Florian Sch{\"a}fer and Christopher Pi{\~n}{\'o}n 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 Garc{\'i}a Fern{\'a}ndez, Despina Oikonomou, Gabriel Mart{\'i}nez 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 {\textquoteleft}our{\textquoteright} se and {\textquoteleft}their{\textquoteright} 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 Pi{\~n}{\'o}n for their careful proofreading. Remaining errors are our own responsibility. Fabienne Martin{\textquoteright}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{\textquoteright}s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2022, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona. All rights reserved.",
year = "2022",
doi = "10.5565/rev/isogloss.153",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "8",
pages = "1--34",
journal = "Isogloss",
issn = "2385-4138",
publisher = "Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona",
number = "4",
}