Pronominal verbs in Spanish

• Grant Armstrong ^[1]
  1. [1] University of Wisconsin–Madison

     University of Wisconsin–Madison

     City of Madison, Estados Unidos

     
• Localización: Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone linguistics, ISSN-e 2199-3386, ISSN 1939-0238, Vol. 9, Nº. 1, 2016, págs. 29-65
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Pronominal verbs (PVs) are a morphological form class of intransitive verbs in Spanish such as acatarrar-se (= to get a cold) and quejar-se (= to complain) that are obligatorily marked with the reflexive, or se, clitic. The main objective of this paper is to propose a solution to the following puzzle: PVs represent a heterogeneous set of argument structure configurations but are formally marked in the same way. In order to do so, I empirically motivate the existence of two different argument structure configurations within the class of PVs, unaccusative and unergative. I then show that what makes these configurations unique is that they contain a deficiency in Voice, in the form of unchecked formal features. This deficiency has a different source in each configuration: it is an unchecked categorial D-feature in unaccusatives and unvalued phi-features in unergatives. The reason why these two configurations are marked in the same way is because, as proposed in Pujalte and Saab (2012, Syncretism as PF-repair: The case of se-insertation in Spanish. In Maria C. Cuervo & Yves Roberge (eds.), The end of argument structure? 229–260. Bingley, UK: Emerald Press.), the se clitic paradigm is used as a general repair mechanism to eliminate unchecked D and phi features on Voice post-syntactically.