Spanish se and the one-or-many question

SAAB, ANDRÉS

Mesa redonda; en Abralin Arena-Linguists Online, Associação Brasileira de Lingüística; 2022

I conceive of Spanish se as a probe for A-movement. On the theory to be presented, both paradigmatic (e.g., reflexive, inherent) and non-paradigmatic se (e.g., impersonal, passive) receive a uniform analysis; the differences among different ?types? being related to Case, agreement and other independent syntactic properties. As I will show, Spanish se-probes evolved from plain pronouns, i.e., variables in the semantics. The distinction between variables and ϕ-probes is not always transparent, but a brief comparison with Italian, a language in which si is still a variable, will be enough to illustrate what type of predictions and what type of (Romance) languages follow under the present theory.