THE SPANISH REFLEXIVE CLITIC SE AS AN ASPECTUAL CLASS MARKER

This article proposes that the Spanish reflexive clitic se used in cer tain transitive construction is a marker of a class of situations that are quantitatively delimited. This class of situations includes both events and states; the quantitative delimitedness they express is akin to but not restricted to the notion of TELICITY (cf. Garey 1957). The paper proceeds as follows: First, I identify the use of se (SE(q), he nceforth) that does not fit in the traditional classification. After p revious literature is reviewed, I show that all sentences with SE(q) s hare one common property: they must contain a quantitatively delimited direct object. Upon explicating how the (object) NP denotation and th e VP denotation correlate in transitive sentences, I propose that sent ences with SE(q) are intended to express quantitatively delimited situ ations in time or in space, and that SE(q) is an overt marker of such situations. The findings of this study have two important implications . First, previous analyses commonly treat the Romance clitic se/si as a ''valency-reducing'' morpheme (cf. Wehrli 1986; and others); such a theory is not general enough to accommodate SE(q). Second, the analogy between the NP denotation and the VP denotation has long been recogni zed in event semantics. The present study demonstrates that this seman tic correlation holds not only for dynamic situations but also for sta tes.