Boundaries at play
Se in the Spanish psych domain
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.
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
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Cited by (1)
Cited by one other publication
Bondaruk, Anna & Bożena Rozwadowska
2024.
Alternating arguments of Polish psych verbs.
Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 9:1

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