Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

The lexical pragmatics of se-marking in French

(Joint work with Fabienne Martin and Florian Schäfer)

In French, anticausative verbs can be divided into three distributional classes, depending on whether they are marked with the clitic se, traditionally considered a “reflexive” marker. Some anticausatives must be marked with se, some cannot be marked with se, and some are optionally marked. We investigate this optional marking in a series of large-scale acceptability studies, finding that this optionality does not amount to free variation but depends on how the lexical semantics of the verb interacts with animacy. Looking at cases of optionality, anticausative verbs denoting events that normally occur beyond the subject’s control (such as rougir ‘blush’) are more likely to occur without se when the subject is human; we call these In-Control Anticausatives. Anticausative verbs denoting events that normally occur under the subject’s control (such as plier ‘bend over’) are more likely to occur with se when the subject is human; we call these Limited-Control Anticausatives. There is no preference in either case when the subject is inanimate. These results are not predicted by telicity or perfectivity, factors suggested by previous accounts of se-optionality.

To explain the findings, we make the case for an analysis embedded in lexical pragmatics. In the context of a human subject, speakers strongly prefer the variant that avoids alternative and unintended interpretations which arise in parallel with the intended interpretation. Understanding these preferences requires taking into account the syntactic multifunctionality of se. Similar considerations also constrain the availability of the impersonal il-construction and se-passives, highlighting the interplay of syntax and lexical pragmatics.

Full manuscript: https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/007069