Unraveling the complexity of SE
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The collection, divided into four sections, proposes that SE constructions may be divided into one class that is the result of grammaticalization of a reflexive pronoun up the syntactic tree, from Voice and above, and another class that has resulted from the reanalysis of reflexive and anticausative morphemes as an argument expletive or verbal morpheme generated in positions from Voice and below. The contributions, while varied in both empirical content and theoretical approach, all serve to highlight different aspects of the overarching idea that SE constructions have evolved from these two distinct grammaticalization paths.
The book appeals to researchers and academics in the field and closes with a unified approach to various SE constructions that makes important use of its status as a verbal morpheme. In addition to aligning a novel string of empirical contributions under a new theoretical umbrella, a clear research direction emerges from this volume based on the morphosyntactic nature of SE itself: Is it a clitic, an agreement morpheme, or a verbal morpheme?
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Jonathan E. MacDonald is Associate Professor of Linguistics and of Spanish & Portuguese at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His general research area lies in the domain of theoretical syntax, with a specific focus on Romance SE constructions, and inner aspect. His work has appeared in journals such as Linguistic Inquiry, Syntax, Journal of Linguistics, and Probus, as well as numerous contributions in volumes edited by Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, John Benjamins, among others.
