D feature and impersonal SE: A new perspective on Romance impersonal constructions
Kazuya Bamba, University of Toronto
The nature of the reflexive clitic se, used in Romance languages to express impersonality
(1), remains the subject of a long-lasting controversy in the literature.
(1) a. Se come
mucho aquí b. Spesso si arriva
in ritardo
SE eat.3.SG.PRES much here
often
SE arrive.3.SG.PRES in late
‘One eats a lot here’ (Spanish)
‘One often arrives late’ (Italian; D’Alessandro, 2007)
Previous proposals have generally treated this clitic as filling the role of an otherwise overt
subject argument in null subject (NS) languages: it is analysed as either an argument clitic
associated with the external θ-role (Kayne, 1986; Cinque, 1988) or the morphological exponent
of a syntactic feature in NS languages (Belletti, 1982; Otero, 1986). Cross-linguistic variation of
the impersonal reflexives reveals, however, that neither of these analyses is satisfactory, as they
fail to explain the presence of an additional subject element in the same clause (2a) or that of the
clitic se in a non-NS language such as French (2b).
(2) a. A gente chama-se
rãs a isto
PRON call.3.SG.PRES-SE rãs to that
‘We call these ones rãs (‘frogs’)’ (European Portuguese dialects; Martins, 2009)
b. Il
se mange
souvent des
gâteaux ici
EXP SE eat.3.SG.PRES often
PART cake.PL here
‘One often eats cakes here’ (French; Cinque, 1988; Mendikoetxea, 2008)
As a solution to this problem, I present an alternative analysis of the impersonal se in
which the clitic is considered as the morphological exponent of a specificity feature, [-specific],
on D in T. I argue that the full specification of φ-features in T (cf. rich agreement morphology)
in NS languages values the D feature as [+specific], and thus a [-specific] feature must be spelled
out by se in order for the non-specific reading to be computed at LF. In non-NS languages such
as English, on the other hand, an indefinite expression spells out this D feature in the spec-TP
position, fulfilling the EPP (Chomsky, 1981). The D property of se also introduces a new insight
to the theoretical investigation of the variation of impersonal reflexives such as in (2).
Many of the previous studies (Belletti, 1982; Rizzi, 1986; Borer, 1989; Mendikoextea,
1992) attributed the cross-linguistic variation of Romance impersonal constructions to the NS
property under the assumption that the nature of INFL changes depending on this property. The
increasing awareness of the more complex nature of null subjects (Barbosa, 2011), however,
exhibits a great challenge for this line of analysis, as it assumes that the NS property is binary.
Likewise, the rich diversity of impersonal constructions generally presents counter-evidence for
a comprehensive generalisation such as Holmberg’s (2005), which associates the NS property of
languages with the ways these languages syntactically convey impersonality.
The proposed D-feature analysis thus makes a novel theoretical claim with respect to this
variation. Building on the proposed link between D and se, I argue that the interaction between
the EPP and subject identification is what determines the distribution of the clitic, and more
generally, how impersonality is expressed across languages. I develop the idea that the ways
languages express impersonality (e.g., reflexive construction, generic null pronoun, overt subject
pronoun) are directly constrained by the ways they identify the subject referent (e.g., verbal
agreement, pronoun, discourse) and how it is morpho-syntactically realised in the inflectional
domain. Therefore, this study contributes to the development of our understanding of both
reflexive and non-reflexive impersonal constructions in Romance and beyond.
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List of Abbreviations
SE – reflexive clitic PRON – subject pronoun
PRES – present tense
EXP – expletive
PART – partitive (article)
References
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