Logos

CONSTRUCTIONcon.spa.se-accidental

construcción de se accidental

A pattern in which a clitic removing the causing participant is joined by a second clitic naming someone the event happened to, so the outcome is stated as unintended.

The construction stacks two operations on one clause. The reflexive clitic removes the participant that would have caused the event, exactly as in the anticausative, and a dative clitic then names a participant the event happened to, who is understood as the one who would have been responsible had it been intentional. Two analyses of the dative are in the field and they disagree about its status. On the first it is an argument the construction itself supplies, which explains why it is interpreted as the unwilling agent rather than as a mere beneficiary. On the second it is the ordinary dative of the affected participant, available to many clauses, and the unintentional reading is an inference from the absence of an agent rather than a meaning of the pattern. The record is marked contested on that point, and the ordering of the two clitics is fixed by the construction rather than read off the general ordering rule, which is why it is also marked irreducible.

statusstatus
contestedasserted, and the sources disagree
provenanceprovenance
authoredwritten for Logos, from first principles
derivation statusderivation_status
irreducibleit follows from nothing: an arbitrary fact of the language
saliencesalience
No salience. Where no frequency source applies the object carries none, rather than a default or a guess (03-schema.md §3.5).
aliasesaliases
  • metalanguageaccidental se
sourcessources
  • SOURCENueva gramática de la lengua española (2009)src.nueva-gramaticano page in v1
  • SOURCEA New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish (Butt and Benjamin)src.butt-benjaminno page in v1

Why this is a construction at all

construction.admission

Goldberg's admission test: a template earns storage either by being unpredictable or by being frequent.

admissionadmission
unpredictableit is stored because its meaning does not follow from its parts

The slots

construction.slots

At least two, by the schema: fewer is not a multi-element template. Every filler is a link, never a name in prose.

  1. 0el clítico se, que suprime al causantelexically specified: only the fillers below may occupy it

    fillerslots[].filler
    functionslots[].fn
    No function is assigned to this slot.

  2. 1el clítico dativo, que nombra al afectadolexically specified: only the fillers below may occupy it

    fillerslots[].filler
    functionslots[].fn
    FUNCTIONcomplemento indirectofun.spa.complemento-indirecto

  3. 2el verbo, finitolexically specified: only the fillers below may occupy it

    fillerslots[].filler
    functionslots[].fn
    FUNCTIONnúcleofun.spa.nucleo

  4. 3la entidad que sufre el cambio, con la que el verbo concuerdapositional: this slot is a place in the string, not a lexical requirement

    fillerslots[].filler
    No filler is named. For a positional slot that is the correct reading; for a lexical one it is a gap.
    functionslots[].fn
    FUNCTIONsujetofun.spa.sujeto

Slot template

4 slots: 3 constrained, 1 positional, 3 naming a grammatical function.

  1. el clítico se, que suprime al causante
    constrained
    • clítico reflexivoclass
  2. el clítico dativo, que nombra al afectado
    constrained
    • clítico dativoclass

    names complemento indirecto

  3. el verbo, finito
    constrained
    • verboclass

    names núcleo

  4. la entidad que sufre el cambio, con la que el verbo concuerda
    positional

    no lexical filler — this slot marks a position only

    names sujeto

Confusable with

construction.confusable

Objects a reader is likely to mix up with this one, and the difference that separates them. The edge is symmetric and stored once, so this renders on both objects' pages from the one statement.

Everything joined to this object

One group per typed edge, in both directions. A1b guarantees no object node is an orphan, so this is the whole navigation: an object with no edges would have failed the build rather than reached this page.

What this object is a kind of

Walking this object's own `is-a` edges: what it is a kind of. Several branches from one object are several classification axes, not competing supertypes.

objects
1
places drawn
1
multi-parent
None in this view. This subgraph happens to be a tree, which the explorer draws as one without assuming it is one.

Siblings are listed by name, then by id to break ties. That is a display choice made here and not an order the graph asserts.

Fan-out per dimension

A4

One row per dimension, largest first. That is a display order, not a verdict: 03-schema.md declares no threshold above which fan-out is too much, so this reports the count and grades nothing.

  • case13 values
  • mood8 values
  • voice8 values
  • aspect7 values
  • aktionsart6 values
  • number6 values
  • person6 values
  • tense6 values
  • comparison4 values
  • evidentiality4 values
  • gender4 values
  • politeness4 values
  • valency4 values
  • animacy3 values
  • definiteness3 values
  • deixis3 values
  • finiteness2 values
  • information structure2 values
  • interrogativity2 values
  • polarity2 values
  • switch-reference2 values

What kinds of this object there are

Walking the `is-a` edges that point at this object: what kinds of it there are. An object reachable two ways is drawn in both places and is still one object.

objects
1
places drawn
1
multi-parent
None in this view. This subgraph happens to be a tree, which the explorer draws as one without assuming it is one.

Siblings are listed by name, then by id to break ties. That is a display choice made here and not an order the graph asserts.

has-a

edges.has-a

the parent carries this

this object carries

overrides

edges.overrides

declared arbitrariness (A7)

this object overrides

derives

edges.derives

the why-chain

derived by