Spanish Causative SE: from Agent to Cause

The University of Iowa Department of Linguistics Colloquium Series Fall 2017

Spanish Causative SE: From agent to cause

Paula Kempchinsky Department of Spanish & Portuguese

Thursday, September 28, 2017 4:00pm 105 EPB

Spanish, like the other Romance languages, has a number of syntactic constructions based on the reflexive clitic SE. In this collaborative work with Grant Armstrong (University of Wisconsin-Madison), we examine sentences such as (1) and (2): (1) Juan se afeita (a sí mismo) cuidadosamente todos los días. Juan SE shaves (himself) carefully everyday. (2) Juan se afeita (*a sí mismo) en la barbería para parecer más elegante. Juan SE shaves (*himself) at the barbershop in order to appear more elegant. (1) is an agentive reflexive sentence, where the subject Juan, an agent, can be modified by the agent-oriented adverb carefully. (2), in contrast, is a causative sentence where the subject Juan is the cause of the shaving action and and can control the purpose adjunct. The agent is not even present implicitly, as shown by (3): (3) #Juan se afeita cuidadosamente en la barbería para parecer más elegante. Juan SE shaves carefully at the barbershop in order to appear more elegant. The question that arises is why the presence of SE changes the theta role of the subject from AGENT to CAUSE and, more basically, how SE is represented in the structure. We argue, based on work by Armstrong (2011), that SE in general is the manifestation of a D(eterminer) feature. In agentive reflexives, this D feature is essentially the direct object selected by V, and v has the value of AGENT. In causative SE structures, V selects a small clause which represents a result state (for example, John being in a shaved state), and D is located within this small clause. In such sentences, the value of v changes from AGENT to CAUSE. We consider briefly the extralinguistic factors which seem to play a role in determining which verbs can enter into the causative SE construction.

Please join us for refreshments before the talk at 3:30 pm in 571 EPB.