LOW APPLICATIVES AND OPTIONAL "SE" IN SPANISH NON-ANTICAUSATIVE INTRANSITIVE VERBS

This work revolves around a very peculiar set of Spanish verbs ('caer[se]', 'morir[se]', 'tropezar[se]', and 'encallar[se]', among others), which optionally allow the clitic 'se' without any significant change of meaning. These verbs do not enter the transitive-inchoative alternation (i.e. they are non-anticausative). Besides, the presence of the clitic has little semantic contribution, if any at all. They are problematic because they cannot be integrated in existing analyses that account for other instances of pronominal verbs like anticausatives and reflexives. What it is proposed in this work is that these verbs are optionally selected by a low applicative head. Moreover, the clitic 'se' is thought of as a nominal item. This allows the integration of these verbs in broader analyses of pronominal verbs that consider the clitic a nominal item (whether argumental or expletive-like).