La relación entre estructura eventiva y papeles temáticos: El se aspectual del español

Abstract

This article aims at explaining the pronoun "se" in Spanish that comes up in consumption verbs such as "leer(se)" in "Juan se leyó un libro" v. "Juan leyó un libro". Some previous analyzes have been based on the idea that the contribution of "se" to the semantics of the predicate has got an aspectual character. We argue that the contribution of these syntactic configurations is thematic and not aspectual: "se" is a fully functional pronoun that is interpreted as a participant of the event denoted by the verb because it is marked with dative case and thematic role of tico 'experimentante'. The presence of this experiencer argument legitimizes the predicate's expansion caused by adding an event (a resulting state) argument which pervades the clitic "se".