Differential subject marking through SE

Abstract

Abstract An outstanding question in current studies concerns the status of Romance SE that does not obviously mark reflexivity or anticausativity. This paper signals the presence of such constructions in Old and Modern Romanian, where SE occurs with unergative verbs and qualifies as pleonastic according to traditional grammars (i.e., it makes no difference for the truth conditions or for the argument structure). The main argument is that such constructions are actually instances of differential subject marking (DSM) in Romanian, and that the semantic triggers and the underlying configuration resemble those that occur with differential object marking (DOM) in this language. In terms of theoretical contribution, this analysis (i) widens the cross-linguistic inventory of DSM patterns, by adding Clitic Doubling; (ii) confirms the predictions of recent studies that there could be similarity rather than opposition between DOM and DSM contexts; (iii) shows the possibility of re-allocating the reflexive pronoun SE to other configurations besides (an instance of) verb reflexivization.