Reflexiones en torno al clítico se en español

Abstract

This paper proposes a new approach to the formal and semantic problems of the description of se in Spanish. These problems are concerned with the morphological status of se, its syntactical behavior and, above all, the complexity of its semantic implications, which are mostly hardly structured in the language, such as reflexivity, diathesis, impersonality, etc. The semantic functions of se cover a broad spectrum of syntactic and conceptual nuances, which take the form of a continuum starting with a subject-responsible predicate and ending with a predicate with no subject at all. I will also distinguish here two different se-types in Spanish: the so-named "diathetic" one, which is the formal representative of the medium voice in Spanish, and the expletive one, whis is related to the expression of verbal aspect and is therefore more attached to the predicate's interpretation.