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Part of
Points of Convergence in Romance Linguistics: Papers selected from the 48th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL 48), Toronto, 25-28 April 2018
Edited by Gabriela Alboiu and Ruth King
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 360] 2022
► pp. 127–142

Chapter 7
On (un)grammatical sequences of ses in Spanish

| University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
| University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

We discuss the ungrammaticality of Spanish impersonal se (Impse) in combination with another se in control structures. Our main goal is to critically evaluate Martins & Nunes’s (2017) account of parallel phenomena in European Portuguese, who, adopting a movement theory of control, claim that Impse merges in the external argument of the non-finite embedded verb and moves to the matrix clause. When Impse and the other se are transferred within the same phase, the result is ungrammaticality due to an identity violation. We illustrate that their approach cannot be extended to Spanish. Instead, we put forth MacDonald & Vázquez-Lozares’s (2021) proposal as an alternative, which as we show allows for an extension to ungrammatical contexts in which the identity of se cannot be appealed to.

Keywords: impersonal se, paradigmatic se, clitic climbing, clitic combinations, identity violation, control structures, Spanish
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Martins & Nunes (2017)
    • 2.1Matrix-embedded asymmetries
      • 2.1.1Impse + Spurse matrix-embedded asymmetry
      • 2.1.2Impse + lo matrix-embedded asymmetry
  • 3.Clitic climbing
  • 4.An alternative proposal and an extension
  • 5.A brief recap
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 10 March 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.360.07mac
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