Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Scalar Constraints on Anticausative SE: The Aspectual Hypothesis Revisited

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Unraveling the complexity of SE

Part of the book series: Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory ((SNLT,volume 99))

Abstract

This chapter addresses the co-existence of two morphological mechanisms to express the causative-unaccusative alternation in Spanish: se and Ø. It has been observed that the choice between these patterns seems to be related to aspect in Romance. However, a detailed study of Spanish data will allow us to refine this hypothesis by claiming that aspect itself is determined by scale structure. Se and Ø will be analyzed as two lexical items competing to spell out the same head, v[BECOME], related to unaccusativity and located above AspP. Therefore, scale structure and, eventually, aspect will be the relevant grammatical factors determining the competition to spell out v[BECOME] in Spanish.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 84.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 129.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. 1.

    There is significant dialectal variation with regard to classes B and C in Spanish. Furthermore, even if class B is usually smaller than class A in Romance, the difference in number found in Spanish is striking.

  2. 2.

    The verbs that I include in this class are the ones that in my own dialect (Peninsular Spanish, Madrid) can optionally take se.

  3. 3.

    Notice, for instance, that both (6a) and (6b) allow durante (‘for’) in a ‘duration of the result state’ reading (The patient was better for a week). This and other diagnosis are presented in detail by the aforementioned authors, together with explanations for some apparent counterexamples.

  4. 4.

    In fact, Heidinger (2014) treats French class B as a fossil in terms of “diachronic persistence”.

  5. 5.

    Unlike English, Spanish uses the present tense in the almost-constructions with a past meaning, which does not affect the validity of these examples as telicity tests. The past tense is ungrammatical: *Antonio casi murió (‘Antonio almost died’).

  6. 6.

    The actual truth conditions of each reading are controversial (see Xu 2016 for recent discussion); thus for the purposes of this paper it will suffice to say that the CFR targets the initiation of the event—preventing it from starting– while the SR targets the end of the event—preventing it from finishing.

  7. 7.

    Se can appear with other verbs, like estar (‘be’)—Pepe se estuvo callado toda la tarde (‘Pepe remained quiet during the whole afternoon’)–, where Sánchez López (2002) sees a connection with agentivity while De Miguel and Fernández Lagunilla (2000, 29) see a COS event.

  8. 8.

    Although most studies agree about the aspectual nature of se in transitive contexts, some authors have argued that the clitic might be an affected argument (see Rigau 1994; Teomiro 2013; MacDonald 2017).

  9. 9.

    (Se) salió del cine durante cinco minutos (‘He left the cinema for 5 min’) expresses the duration of the result state with and without se.

  10. 10.

    See Caudal and Nicolas (2005) for discussion about the existence and relevance of two-point scales. By distinguishing between simple and complex COS achievements, I am distinguishing between non-scalar and scalar COS achievements (see Sect. 4).

  11. 11.

    I use the term ‘deadjectival’ in a broad sense: not all COS verbs derive directly from adjectives, but they all denote a change along a scale.

  12. 12.

    These features cannot be simply placed on the root because this would lead to overly strong predictions about the aspectual properties of deadjectival nouns, for instance, and would prevent deadjectival verbs from showing variable aspectual behavior.

  13. 13.

    Again, if this is the difference between despertar (‘wake up’) and despertarse, this information cannot belong to the root.

  14. 14.

    Achievements which do not express a COS event do not have a result state (score two points).

  15. 15.

    Notice that in Spanish, unlike English, this verb derives from the open scale adjective gordo (‘fat’).

  16. 16.

    There is no need to use a specific head with causative semantics, the embedding relation between both subevents is enough (Hale and Keyser 1993; Cuervo 2003; Schäfer 2008).

  17. 17.

    See also Basilico (2010) for a different implementation of the little v analysis of se, where this head introduces the EA.

  18. 18.

    See Chung (2007), Caha (2009) and Pantcheva (2011), among others, for discussion about the theoretical adequacy of post-syntactic operations in Distributed Morphology.

  19. 19.

    See Cuervo (2003) for an in-depth study of datives, focused on Spanish.

  20. 20.

    One might think that there could be a difference in size if se was the phrasal spell out of [v [AspF]] as opposed to Ø, which would spell out only [v]. However, there seems to be other idiosyncratic factors involved in the choice between se and Ø that depend on how speakers conceptualize COS event as more or less likely to happen spontaneously (see Haspelmath 1993; Schäfer 2008; Letuchyi 2010; Haspelmath et al. 2014; Heidinger 2015; Vivanco 2017). Because of this and also because aspect is actually determined by DegP—i.e. it is not the lowest head involved in this problem–I opt for an analysis where Spanish se/and Ø do not differ in size, but in their grammatical and idiosyncratic conditions on spell out. See Kempchinsky (2004) for an analysis of se directly in AspP.

References

  • Alexiadou, Artemis, and Elena Anagnostopoulou. 2004. Voice morphology in the causative-inchoative alternation: Evidence for a non-unified structural analysis of unaccusatives. In The unaccusativity puzzle: Explorations of the syntax-lexicon interface, ed. Artemis Alexiadou, Elena Anagnostopoulou, and Martin Everaert, 114–136. Oxford: Oxofrd University Press.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Alexiadou, Artemis, Elena Anagnostopoulou, and Florian Schäfer. 2006. The properties of anticausatives cross-linguistically. In Phases of interpretation, ed. M. Frascarelli, 187–211. Berlin: Mouton.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2015. External arguments in transitivity alternations. A layering approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Armstrong, Grant. 2013. Agentive reflexive clitics and transitive se constructions in Spanish. Borealis. An International Journal of Hispanic Linguistics 2 (2): 81–128. https://doi.org/10.7557/1.2.2.2526.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Basilico, David. 2010. The se clitic and its relation to paths. Probus 22: 271–302. https://doi.org/10.1515/prbs.2010.010.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • ———. n.d.. Spanish se as a high and low verbalizer.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bull, William E. 1950. The intransitive reflexive ir and irse. Modern Language Journal 26: 382–389.

    Google Scholar 

  • Caha, Pavel. 2009. The nanosyntax of case. PhD diss., Tromsø University.

    Google Scholar 

  • Caudal, Patrick, and David Nicolas. 2005. Types of degrees and types of event structures. In Event arguments foundations and applications, ed. Claudia Maienborn and Angelika Wöllstein, 277–300. Tübingen: Niemeyer.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Cennamo, Michela, Thórhallur Eythórsson, and Jóhanna Barðdal. 2015. Semantic and (morpho)syntactic constraints on anticausativization: Evidence from Latin and Old Norse-Icelandic. Linguistics 53 (4): 677–730. https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2015-0015.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Chomsky, Noam. 2000. Minimalist inquiries. In Step by step: Essays on minimalist syntax in honor of Howard Lasnik, ed. Roger Martin, David Michaels, and Juan Uriagereka, 89–155. Cambridge: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2001. Derivation by phase. In Ken Hale: A life in language, ed. Michael Kenstowicz, 1–52. Cambridge: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Chung, Inkie. 2007. Suppletive negation in Korean and Distribuited Morphology. Lingua 117 (1): 95–148. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2005.10.002.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cuervo, María Cristina. 2003. Datives at large. PhD diss., MIT.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2014. Alternating unaccusatives and the distribution of roots. Lingua 141: 48–70. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2013.12.001.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • de Benito, Carlota. 2016. Las construcciones con 'se' desde una perspectiva variacionista y dialectal. PhD Thesis, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.

    Google Scholar 

  • De Mello, George. 1997. Morir vs. Morirse. In Lengua escrita y habla culta en América y España: Diez casos, ed. Josse de Kock and George De Mello, 99–117. Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca.

    Google Scholar 

  • De Miguel, Elena, and Maria Fernández Lagunilla. 2000. El operador aspectual se. Revista Española de Lingüística 30 (1): 13–43.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dini, Luca, and Pier Marco Bertinetto. 1995. Punctual verbs and the ontology of events. In Quaderni del Laboratorio di Linguistica della SNS. Pisa: Scuola Normale Superiore.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dowty, David. 1979. Word, meaning and Montague grammar. In The semantics of verbs and time in generative semantics and Montague’s PTQ. Dordrecht: Reidel.

    Google Scholar 

  • Epstein, Samuel D. 1999. Un-principled syntax: The derivation of syntactic relations. In Working minimalism, ed. Samuel Epstein and Norbert Hornstein, 317–345. Cambridge: MIT Press.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Fernández Jiménez, Ángel, and Mercedes Tubino Blanco. 2014. Variación sintáctica en la causativización léxica. Revista Española de Lingüística 44 (1): 7–37.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fernández Soriano, Olga. 1999. Datives in constructions with unaccusative se. Catalan Working Papers in Linguistics 7: 89–106.

    Google Scholar 

  • Filip, Hana. 1999. Aspect, eventuality types and nominal reference. New York: Garland.

    Google Scholar 

  • Folli, Raffaella. 2001. Constructing telicity in English and Italian. PhD diss., Oxford University.

    Google Scholar 

  • Folli, Raffaella, and Heidi Harley. 2005. Flavors of v: Consuming results in Italian and English. In Aspectual inquiries, ed. Roumanya Slabakova and Paula Kempchinsky, 95–120. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • García Fernández, Luis. 2011. Algunas observaciones sobre se aspectual. In Estudios sobre perífrasis y aspecto, ed. Juan Cuartero Otal, Luis García Fernández, and Carsten Sinner, 43–71. München: Peniope.

    Google Scholar 

  • García Pardo Alfredo. n.d. Light verbs and the syntactic configurations of se.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gianollo, Chiara. 2014. Labile verbs in late Latin. Linguistics 52 (4): 945–1002. https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2014-0013.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hale, Ken, and Samuel J. Keyser. 1993. On argument structure and the lexical expression of syntactic relations. In The view from building 20, ed. Ken Hale and Samuel J. Keyser, 53–109. Cambridge: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Halle, Morris. 1997. Distributed morphology: Impoverishment and fission. In MIT working papers on linguistics (30): Papers at the interface, ed. Benjamin Bruening, Yoonjung Kang, and Martha McGinnis, 425–449. Cambridge: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Halle, Morris, and Alec Marantz. 1993. Distributed morphology and the pieces of inflection. In The view from building 20, ed. Ken Hale and Samuel J. Keyser, 111–176. Cambridge: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Harley, Heidi. 2013. External arguments and the mirror principle: On the distinctness between Voice and v. Lingua 125: 34–57.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Haspelmath, Martin. 1993. More on the typology of inchoative/causative alternations. In Causatives and transitivity, ed. B. Comrie and M. Polinsky, 87–120. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Haspelmath, Martin, Andreea Calude, Michael Spagnol, Heiko Narrog, and Elif Bamyaci. 2014. Coding causal–noncausal verb alternations: A form–frequency correspondence explanation. Journal of Linguistics 50 (3): 587–625. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022226714000255.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hay, Jennifer, Christopher Kennedy, and Beth Levin. 1999. Scalar structure underlies telicity in ‘degree achievements’. In Proceedings of SALT 9, ed. T. Mathews and D. Strolovitch, 127–144. Ithaca: Cornell Linguistics Circle Publications.

    Google Scholar 

  • Heidinger, Steffen. 2014. The persistence of labile verbs in the French causative-anticausative alternation. Linguistics 52 (4): 1003–1024. https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2014-0014.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2015. Causalness and the encoding of the causative-anticausative alternation in French and Spanish. Journal of Linguistics. 51: 562–594. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022226714000607.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kailuweit, Rolf. 2012. Construcciones anticausativas: El español comparado con el francés. In Aspectualidad—transitividad—referencialidad. Las lenguas románicas en contraste, ed. Valeriano Bellosta von Colbe and Marco García, 133–158. Frankfurt A. M.: Peter Lang.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kearns, Kate. 2007. Telic senses of deadjectival verbs. Lingua 117 (1): 26–66. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2005.09.002.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kempchinsky, Paula. 2004. Romance se as an aspectual element. In Contemporary approaches to romance linguistics, ed. J. Auger et al., 239–256. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Kennedy, Christopher. 1999. Projecting the adjective: The syntax and semantics of gradability and comparison. New York: Garland.

    Google Scholar 

  • Key, Greg. 2013. The morphosyntax of the Turkish causative construction. PhD diss., University of Arizona.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kratzer, Angelika. 1996. Severing the external argument from its verb. In Phrase structure and the lexicon, ed. Johan Rooryck and Laurie Zaring, 109–137. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Krifka, Manfred. 1992. Thematic relations and links between nominal reference and temporal constitution. In Lexical matters, ed. Ivan A. Sag and Anna Szabolcsi, 29–53. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.

    Google Scholar 

  • Labelle, Marie. 1992. Change of state and valency. Journal of Linguistics 28: 375–414.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Labelle, Marie, and Edit Doron. 2010. Anticausative derivations (and other valency alternations) in French. Probus 22 (2): 303–316.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Legate, Julie Anne. 2014. Voice and v. lessons from acehnese. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Legendre, Geraldine, and Paul Smolensky. 2010. French inchoatives and the unaccusativity hypothesis. In Hypothesis A/Hypothesis B: Linguistic explorations in honor of David M. Perlmutter, ed. Donna Gerdts, John Moore, and Maria Polinsky, 229–246. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Letuchyi, Alexander. 2010. Lability and spontaneity. In Transitivity. Form, meaning, acquisition and processing, ed. Patrick Brand and Marco García García, 237–256. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • López, Luis. 2012. Indefinite objects. Scrambling, choice functions and differential marking. In Linguistic Inquiry Monograph 63. Cambridge: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • MacDonald, Jonathan E. 2008. The syntactic nature of inner aspect: A minimalist perspective. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2017. Spanish aspectual se as an indirect object reflexive: The import of atelicity, bare nouns and leísta PCC repairs. Probus 29 (1): 73–118. https://doi.org/10.1515/probus-2015-0009.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Martin, Fabienne, and Florian Schäfer. 2014. Anticausatives compete but do not differ in meaning: A French case study. In Proceedings of the 4e Congrès Mondial de Linguistique Française, ed. F. Neveu, L. Hriba, J. Meinschaefer, P. Blumenthal, A. Gerstenberg, and S. Prevost, 2485–2500. New York: Curran Associates, Inc.

    Google Scholar 

  • Masullo, Pascual José. 1992. Antipassive constructions in Spanish. In Romance languages and modern linguistic theory, ed. P. Hirschbuhler and K. Koerner, 175–194. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Nishida, Chiyo. 1994. The Spanish reflexive se as an aspectual class marker. Linguistics 32 (3): 425–458.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Noyer, R. R. 1992. Features, positions and affixes in autonomous morpholical structure. PhD Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pantcheva, Marina. 2011. Decomposing Path. The nanosyntax of directional expressions. PhD diss., Tromsø University.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pineda, Anna. n.d. The role of SE and NE in romance verbs of directed motion. Evidence from Catalan, Italian, Aragonese and Spanish varieties.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pylkkänen, Liina. 2008. Introducing arguments. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Ramchand, Gillian. 2008. Verb meaning and the lexicon: A first phase syntax. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Rapp, Irene, and Arnim von Stechow. 1999. Fast ‘almost’ and the visibility parameter for functional adverbs. Journal of Semantics 16 (2): 149–204.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Rappaport-Hovav, Malka. 2008. Lexicalized meaning and the internal temporal structure of events. In Theoretical and crosslinguistic approaches to aspect, ed. Susan Rothstein, 13–42. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/la.110.03hov.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Rigau, Gemma. 1994. Les propietats dels verbs pronominals. Els Marges 50: 29–39.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sánchez López, Cristina. 2002. Las construcciones con se. Estado de la cuestión. In Las construcciones con ‘se’, ed. Crisitina Sánchez López, 13–163. Madrid: Visor Libros.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sanz, Monserrat. 2000. Events and predication: A new approach to syntactic processing in English and Spanish. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Sanz, Monserrat, and Itziar Laka. 2002. Oraciones transitivas con se: el modo de acción en la sintaxis. In Las construcciones con se, ed. Crisitina Sánchez López, 309–338. Madrid: Visor.

    Google Scholar 

  • Schäfer, Florian. 2008. The syntax of (anti)causatives. External arguments in change of state contexts. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Starke, Michal. 2011. Towards elegant parameters: Variation reduces to the size of lexically stored trees. Talk given in Barcelona workshop on linguistic variation in the minimalist framework.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tenny, Carol. 1994. Aspectual roles and the syntax semantics interface. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Teomiro, Iván. 2013. Low applicatives and optional se in Spanish non-anticausative intransitive verbs. Revista de Lingüística y Lenguas Aplicadas 8: 140–153.

    Google Scholar 

  • Uriagereka, Juan. 1999. Multiple spell-out. In Working minimalism, ed. Samuel Epstein and Norbert Hornstein, 251–282. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Vivanco, Margot. 2016. Causatividad y cambio de estado en español. La alternancia causativo-inacusativa. PhD diss., Universidad Complutense de Madrid. https://eprints.ucm.es/37123/1/T37038.pdf

  • ———. 2017. La conceptualización de los eventos de cambio de estado y la alternancia lábil en español. Estudios de Lingüística de la Universidad de Alicante 31: 327–347. https://doi.org/10.14198/ELUA2017.31.17.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2019. To be or not to be an auxiliary verb: the case of Spanish poner(se) a + infinitive. Borealis: An International Journal of Hispanic Linguistics 8 (1): 35–54. https://doi.org/10.7557/1.8.1.4655.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2020 ¿Qué hay entre el control y la reestructuración? Sobre la construcción <poner algo a + infinitivo>. Revista Española de Lingüística 50 (2): 2297–258.

    Google Scholar 

  • Xu, Ting. 2016. Almost again: On the semantics and acquisition of decomposition adverbs. PhD diss., University of Connecticut.

    Google Scholar 

  • Zagona, Karen. 1996. Compositionality of aspect: Evidence from Spanish aspectual se. In Aspects of romance linguistics. Selected from the SLSR XXIV, ed. Claudia Parodi et al., 475–488. Georgetown: Georgetown University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Zribi-Hertz, Anne. 1987. La réfrexivité ergative en français moderne. Le Français Moderne 55 (1): 23–52.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgments

Earlier versions of this study were presented at the Going Romance 2014, in Lisbon; at the Workshop on Romance SE/SI constructions, held in Madison (Wisconsin) in April 2016, and at the Linguistics Seminar of the University of Toronto, in july 2016. I thank the participants for their feedback, as well as the anonymous reviewers of this book. I would also like to acknowledge the outstanding work the editors of this volume have done. Finally, my special thanks are due to Cristina Sánchez López, Antonio Fábregas, Ignacio Bosque, Florian Schäfer, Jaume Mateu, Elena de Miguel, Víctor Acedo-Matellán, María Jesús Fernández Leborans and Luis García Fernández for their helpful and valuable comments. All errors remain my own.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Universidad de Castilla La-Mancha, Ciudad Real, Spain

    Margot Vivanco

Authors
  1. Margot Vivanco
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Margot Vivanco .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Spanish & Portuguese, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, WI, USA

    Grant Armstrong

  2. Department of Linguistics, Department of Spanish & Portuguese, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL, USA

    Jonathan E. MacDonald

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2021 Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Vivanco, M. (2021). Scalar Constraints on Anticausative SE: The Aspectual Hypothesis Revisited. In: Armstrong, G., MacDonald, J.E. (eds) Unraveling the complexity of SE. Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, vol 99. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57004-0_12

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation