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Interfaces in Romance: A constraint-based approach
Edited by Gabriela Bîlbîie
[Lingvisticæ Investigationes 43:1] 2020
► pp. 62–94

Boundaries at play

Se in the Spanish psych domain

| Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
| Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

In this paper, we model the left-bounded state reading and the true reflexive reading of the se clitic in the Spanish psychological domain. We argue that a lexical analysis of se provides us with a more accurate description of the different classes of psychological verbs that occur with the clitic. We provide a unified analysis where the use of the two readings of se are modeled by means of lexical rules. We take the morphologically simple but semantically more complex basic items (e.g. asustar ‘frighten’) as input of the lexical rules, getting as the output a morphologically more complex but semantically simpler verb (e.g asustarse ‘get frightened’). The analysis for psych verbs correctly allows only those verbs assigning accusative to the experiencer or the stimulus to combine with se, hence preventing dative verbs from entering the lexical rules. The analysis also demonstrates how to account for punctual and non-punctual readings of psych verbs with se incorporating ‘boundaries’ into the type hierarchy of eventualities.

Keywords: psych verbs, Spanish, cliticization, left-bounded states, reflexive, HPSG
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • 1.Spanish psych verbs and se: Overview
  • 2.Spanish se: Inchoativizer vs. left boundary
  • 3.HPSG background
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1Underspecified constraint for se
    • 4.2LR for true reflexive readings
    • 4.3Constraint for left-bounded readings
    • 4.4LRs for punctual and non-punctual left-bounded readings
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Published online: 16 October 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/li.00040.mac
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