Light Verbs and the Syntactic Configurations of se

Abstract

This paper offers a novel analysis of the Spanish light verbs poner(se) ‘to become’ and quedar(se) ‘to become/stay’ in combination with adjectives. These verbs have the peculiarity that they may appear with or without se in these constructions, with clear effects on argument structure and thematic and aspectual interpretation. I propose a unified formal analysis that takes event complexity and argument coindexing as the common denominator of se in these complex predicates. I further observe that these effects with se are not exclusive to these light verbs, but can also be observed in certain types of lexical verbs, strongly suggesting that both lexical and light verbs lexicalize the same eventive spine.