Discontinuous reciprocity in Spanish

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Published: 24-10-2016

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María Mare
Universidad Nacional del Comahue / CONICET
Argentina
Vol 43 (2016), Articles, pages 269-297
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15304/verba.43.2229
Submitted: 15-11-2014 Accepted: 19-05-2015 Published: 24-10-2016
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Abstract

One of the readings of the clitic ‘se’ in Spanish is the one related to reciprocity. This interpretation differs from the reflexive one in that the first is obtained only when the clitic relates to a plural expression, no matter if it is a morphological plural or a syntactic one (i.e., a coordination). However, the presence of a comitative phrase favors the reciprocity interpretation, even when the expression associated with the clitic is singular (Astérix se abrazó con Obélix Lit. ‘AstérixSG CLSG hugged with Obélix’- ‘Astérix and Obélix hugged each other’). This phenomenon has been called discontinuous reciprocity (Dimitriadis 2000 and subsequent work) and it has been mainly studied for Slavic languages. Our main goal is to revise the properties of this construction in Spanish in order to define, on the one hand, how the comitative phrase relates to the main structure, and on the other, which is the clitic se status. Based on those aspects we develop an analysis framed in Generative Grammar which lets us explain the properties of comitative prepositional phrases and the consequences of their merge in the structure. Specifically, we propose that discontinuous reciprocity is motivated by a v[AG]- which permits the merge of the PP-con ‘with’- in an structure that does not project its external argument.

Keywords:

reciprocity, argument structure, prepositional phrases, adjunction
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