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The Role of SE and NE in Romance Verbs of Directed Motion: Evidence from Catalan, Italian, Aragonese and Spanish Varieties

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Unraveling the complexity of SE

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Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the use of se with directed motion verbs in several Romance languages and varieties. Building on some observations that have been made for Spanish, we adopt a broader cross-linguistic perspective, bringing into discussion an element that has, until now, gone generally unnoticed (aside from descriptive works): the ablative locative clitic that appears, together with se, in Catalan, Italian and Aragonese varieties, as in tornar-se’n ‘go back se ne’ from Catalan. Our data from different Romance languages and dialects allow us to refine the settings of the connection between pronominal directed motion verbs and the existence of a source component. In particular, we posit the existence of a locative head (here tentatively analysed as an applicative), which can be spelled out by an ablative locative clitic. We also argue that directed motion verbs can be conceived of by Romance speakers as simple, punctual events denoting the achievement of a particular position, but also as denoting a complex event that consists of a causing subevent and a resultant state (which is connected to achieving a new position and remaining there for some time, after having left behind the original location). In the latter case, these verbs can surface in their pronominal form, even if it does not happen always, since there is cross-linguistic and cross-dialectal variation regarding the availability of pronominal forms for these verbs, due to different lexicalization patterns.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The clitic se has traditionally been labeled a reflexive marker, hence we use the label refl (followed by specifications for person and number, e.g. refl.3sg) for glossing purposes. Later on, we will also use abl (‘ablative’) for the locative source clitic that appears together with se in some varieties. The other abbreviations used in glosses are the following ones: appl ‘applicative’, asp ‘aspect’, dat ‘dative’, fut ‘future’, fv ‘final vowel’, gen ‘genitive’, imp ‘imperative’, inf ‘infinitive’, ipfv ‘imperfective’, loc ‘locative’, m ‘masculine’, pl ‘plural’, prs ‘present’, pst ‘past’, ptcp ‘participle’, sbjv ‘subjunctive’, sg ‘singular’, scd ‘subject concord class’.

  2. 2.

    De Miguel (1999) adds that verbs already bounded in their initial endpoint (salir ‘go out’ and venir ‘come’) accept se denoting the point of departure but also the destination:

  3. 3.

    As shown in fn. 2, a similar point was made by De Miguel (1999), although restricted to the particular case of salir ‘go out’ and venir ‘come’, verbs already bounded in their initial endpoint (one always goes out of a place, and comes from a place).

  4. 4.

    Just as an illustration, see the verbs in boldface of the following passage from the Decameron: “se·n partí [‘he left’], havent enperò ben considerat la disposició del loch; e esperant la nit, e de aquella lexada passar bona part, llà se·n tornà [‘he went back’], e arrapinyant-se en loch hon no·s foren affarats moscarts, en lo jardí se n’entrà [‘he went in’], en lo qual trobà una anteneta, ab lo qual en la finestra de la donzella se·n pujà [‘he went up’], e per aquella per semblant laugerament se·n podia devallar [‘he was able to go down’]” (Decameró, fifteenth century, Corpus informatitzat del català antic: www.cica.cat)

  5. 5.

    An anonymous reviewer points out that a Romance language with a behaviour similar to general Catalan is contemporary French, where only s’en aller (‘go’), s’en retourner (‘go back’) and se’n venir (‘come’) exist, and where the clitic en has been morphologically incorporated in the case of ‘run away’, s’enfuir (and the same seems to be occurring in some dialects for s’en aller, where something like Jean s’est en allé is replacing Jean s’en est allé).

  6. 6.

    For García Fernández (2011, 63–64), se signals the degree of participation of the subject in the event in which it is involved, in the sense that se can co-appear with agents La gente se salía del cine porque la película era aburrida (‘People refl were coming out of the cinema because the movie was boring’) as well as experiencer subjects, as in dialectal Catalan L’aigua se n’eixia (‘The water refl abl went out’), where something causes the water to undergo a process of spilling over, or in Spanish El cadaver se salió del ataúd (‘The corpse se came out of the coffin’). In contrast, se is not compatible with patients (#La estatua se salió del museo ‘The statue refl went out of the museum’).

  7. 7.

    We assume that for contextual reasons it may be the case that the locative PP remains covert, as in Emilio, después de pasar horas sentado delanto de su casa, al final se entró (‘Emilio, after spending several hours sitting in front of his house, finally se went in’). In such cases, the implication of a resultant state/location is still there, and so is the presence of a SC complement in the structure.

  8. 8.

    In this approach, it is assumed that causers are not necessarily [-human] (such as natural forces), but they can also be [+human], following Folli and Harley (2005).

  9. 9.

    See Cuervo (2014, 53) for the original proposal on verbs like romperse ‘break’, which however differ from DM verbs in many respects –and the analysis of such differences falls beyond the scope of this paper. It is however worth pointing out that the view of anticausatives (such as romperse ‘break’) as underlyingly reflexive has been argued by Koontz-Garboden (2009). A similar analysis is proposed in Wood (2014, 1402–1406) for some Icelandic verbs with the reflexive affix –st/−sja, which is taken to function as an expletive pointing to the Theme (or “figure”, in the author’s account) being correferent with the Agent, or, in other words, the subject having two θ-roles.

  10. 10.

    Crucially, as will be shown in Sect. 4 devoted to the status of ne, this grammaticalized use of ne that co-occurs with se is to be distinguished from the very productive use of the locative clitic ne to replace actual source PPs, just like another locative clitic, hi, is productively used to replace goal and location PPs, as shown by Catalan examples below. See also fn. 16.

  11. 11.

    As an anonymous reviewer notices, entrar-se’n (with both the aspectual se and the locative clitic) is attested in Valencian Catalan but not in general Catalan nor in Aragonese or Italian dialects, which seems to be indicating that that denoting a movement away from some location are accepted everywhere, but not with verbs denoting a movement (from some location) into some location. The notion of source, then, is clearly salient, which supports, we believe, our analysis.

  12. 12.

    It could also be accounted for as an instance of silent variation (Kayne 2005). This locative clitic is actually a sort of agreement in the sense that it replicates a directional component already present in the verbal root. In this sense, the optional coding of a grammatical function is not that unexpected (Comrie 1989). Actually, we could also argue that the non-realization of this head is the most economical solution, whereas what needs to be accounted for is its effective realization. This is Sigurðsson’s (2004, 245) view: “Given the Silence Principle, it is lexicalization that is last resort, requiring some licensing or justification [...], whereas non-lexicalization is the unmarked or the minimal strategy, applied whenever possible”. There are several reasons to keep a category silent: it is more economical for the speaker and the hearer, since the pronunciation of dispensable information is nothing but unnecessary and antieconomical noise (Merchant (2001, 1), Sigurðsson (2004, 245 i 254, fn. 25)). Obviously, this Silence Principle is constrained by a more general one, the Full Interpretation Principle (Chomsky 1986) which ensures the interpretability of syntactic derivations. We leave the exploration of such alternatives for future research.

  13. 13.

    As Peterson (2007, 203 and 229–230) points out in a comparative survey of 50 languages, for a language to have a locative applicative construction, “it appears that it must also have either a benefactive […] or an instrumental applicative construction”. Given that benefactive (dative-like) applicatives have been posited for Romance languagues, the postulation of a locative applicative-like element seems feasible.

  14. 14.

    On the postpositional nature of the suffix -ni, see Bentley (1998, 188).

  15. 15.

    Yet another point in support of our proposal is made by Campanini & Schäfer’s (2011, 30): in an appendix of their work, they briefly mention the case of pronominal verbs in Spanish (with se) and French and Italian (with se and ne) and state that “[t]he locative semantics of the relevant verbs are consistent with the prepositional nature of ne/en: the clitic appears to express a (locative) PP which is inherently encoded by the lexical/root meaning of the verb”.

  16. 16.

    Actually, pronominal DM verbs that are source-oriented, such as ‘go out’, can combine with a source argument, as in the following Valencian Catalan example:

    It is thus important to keep in mind that our ne is different from its full-fledgded counterpart, which in the languages under study is used to replace a source PP with the meaning ‘from some place’, as shown by the following Catalan example:

    At the same time, it is true that in several of the varieties under study the actual preservation (in the spoken language) of ne as an pronoun standing for source locative complements (2) is weak: this is the case of Valencian Catalan, as well as Eastern Aragonese (Arnal Purroy 1998, 316–317), Central Aragonese (Nagore Lain 1986, 106), Southern Italian varieties (Ledgeway 2009, 350; Adam Ledgeway and Alessandra Lombardi, p.c.). It is our view that such a decline is due to independent reasons, but of course it constitutes a matter of future research. Another issue of further research has to do with the deictic interpretation (in particular, speaker-oriented) that pronominal DM verbs seem to have in some varieties such as Calabrian (Alessandra Lombardi, p.c.).

  17. 17.

    Very interestingly, Burzio (1986) and Tortora (1998, 2001) report that the Piedmontese ye and the Borgomanerese gghi, which are goal-indicating locative clitics, can co-occur with DM verbs while being anaphorically non-referential, just like the source-indicating locative clitics we are dealing with. These Northern Italian goal clitics are not referring to any location, they can combine with explicit goal-PP (i), just as we saw for ne in fn. 16:

  18. 18.

    A similar line of reasoning, albeit with differences, is found in Tortora (1998, 2001): she claims that the goal locative clitic gghi that coappears with DM verbs in Borgomanerese (see fn. 17) constitutes evidence for claiming that a phonologically null goal projection is part of the structure of such verbs in general Italian.

  19. 19.

    A similar solution we could resort to is Fusion, an operation invoked within the Distributed Morphology approach (Halle and Marantz 1993) by virtue of which two nodes are fused into a single terminal node and then spelled out as one.

  20. 20.

    Rohlfs (1954, 188) points out that the pronominal use of DM verbs (in Italian) was a further development of a possibility already existent strategy in Latin. Bassols de Climent (1948, 32) and Bobes (1974, 112–113) explain that the use of se with Romance DM verbs is historically related to the ethical reflexive in Latin that occurred rather often with these verbs: Ambulavimus nobis per heremum, Vade tibi in propiam ecclesiam. Bastardas Parera (1953, 112) shows that ethical datives with intransitive verbs appeared as an analogy with transitive verbs (e.g. separare ‘separate’). Such verbs, when combined with sibi, acquired a meaning rather similar to that of DM verbs (e.g separare + sibi ‘leave’). In her exhaustive account of the use of sibi and se in Late Latin, Cennamo (1999, 140) shows that by the eight–ninth centuries, “one can also find se with verbs that in earlier centuries only occurred with sibi (i.e., also with unaccusatives) (e.g. se ire ‘go’, se turnare, se reverti ‘go back’)”.

    As for Romance diachrony, a corpus survey on Old Catalan confirms to us that those verbs appear with se in the earlier texts, and with both se and ne later on (Corpus informatitzat del catala antic: www.cica.cat). An exhaustive diachronic study of such verbs falls however beyond the scope of this paper. See also fn. 4.

  21. 21.

    Actually, we think the approach here presented, where variation boils down to different lexicalization patterns, can be extended to other cases concerning se. Take the example, pointed out by Martín Zorraquino (1979, 297–298), of some north-western Spanish varieties where the clitic of irse ‘leave’ is omitted even when implicitly or explicitly there is a complement indicating source: Va de aquí, ¿Ya va? ‘(S)he is leaving from here. Is (s)he already leaving?’, that being completely out in any other Spanish variety, where Se va de aquí, ¿Ya se va? is the only grammatical option. The same could be said for differences across and within languages such as Catalan marxar ‘leave’, general Spanish marcharse and northern Peninsular Spanish marchar (Sánchez López 2002, 116).

  22. 22.

    As an anonymous reviewer points out, as a complement of single vs. phrasal spell out, we need to assume that there is some mechanism that tells vocabulary insertion to insert se in the presence of a list of some roots, which varies between languages and dialects. A similar mechanism, depending on the former one, would be responsible for the insertion of ne in the presence of se in some languages and varieties too.

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Acknowledgments

Parts of this work were presented at the Seminari de Lingüística Teòrica at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona in December 2015, the IKER Mintegia at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Bayonne (France) in January 2016, the Linguistics Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL46) in Stony Brook (New York) in March 2016, the Workshop on Romance SE/SI constructions in Madison (Wisconsin) in April 2016, and the Cambridge Comparative Syntax 5 (CamCoS5) in Cambridge in May 2016. I would like to thank the participants, as well as two anonymous reviewers, for their valuable comments and suggestions that helped to improve this paper. All errors remain mine This work has been supported by the postdoctoral research fellowship Beatriu de Pinós 2014 BP_A 00165 (Secretaria d’Universitats i Recerca del Departament d’Economia i Coneixement de la Generalitat de Catalunya) and the research project FFI2014-56968-C4-1-P (Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad of the Spanish Government).

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Pineda, A. (2021). The Role of SE and NE in Romance Verbs of Directed Motion: Evidence from Catalan, Italian, Aragonese and Spanish Varieties. 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_11

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