A quantitative approach to variable SE-marking in Spanish ingestive verbs

In this dissertation, I analyze the Spanish ingestive verbs comer 'eat' and beber/tomar 'drink' that variably occur with the pronoun SE and its person/number variants. Many scholars (De Miguel and Fernandez Lagunilla 2000; Nishida 1994; Sanz 2000; Zagona 1996) have claimed that SE is an aspectual marker, and its use imposes a completive interpretation; on this view SE can only occur with telic predicates. However, it is possible to find examples that show that the alternation between SE-marked and non-SE-marked constructions is not only constrained by aspectual-related factors, but also by other factors such as the degree of individuation of the object (cf. Hopper and Thompson 1980) (1) and the (counter)expectations of the speaker (2):;(1) Ayer vi a Sergio, (;(2) a. Marta se comio diez tacos de lengua; b. ;'Marta (;Maldonado (2000) and Clements (2006) have argued that the use of SE in transitive constructions increases the transitivity of the event.;Previous variationist studies of Spanish variable SE marking in motion verbs (Aaron and Torres Cacoullos 2005; Torres Cacoullos and Schwenter 2008) have revealed a set of linguistic factors that contribute to the variability. Among these are clause type, subject expression, grammatical person, tense-mood-aspect and polarity. Thus, a confluence of pragmatic and aspectual factors has been claimed to be relevant to variable SE-marking in Spanish, but qualitative studies cannot explain the myriad of factors determining this variation and their interactions. Following the variationist method, I analyzed variable SE-marking in ingestive verbs in different dialects of Spanish. My analysis of 3958 tokens from spoken and written corpora revealed non-edible/drinkable objects, highly definite and specific objects, non-human subjects, affirmative polarity, grammatical number and object position favor the SE-marked forms of comer and tomar. These results also reveal that the verb beber disfavors SE-marking.;Analysis of the data presented in this dissertation reveals that variable SE marking in Spanish is constrained by pragmatic factors such as animacy and counter-expectations associated with subjectivity and it is also constrained by grammatical factors associated with transitivity. I claim that the so-called aspectual SE is a non-canonical marker with a pragmatic function and a grammatical function. The pragmatic function of SE is to mark non-canonical events (either the events themselves or any of the participants) and the grammatical function of SE is to mark non-canonical transitive clauses that correspond to highly transitive clauses.;Results also reveal that the meaning of SE is determined in conjunction with the lexical/semantic properties of the verb and not by overarching properties of a generalized SE construction as suggested in prior qualitative research. These results, along with the findings reported by Torres Cacoullos and Schwenter (2008) and Aaron and Torres Cacoullos (2005), suggest that the choice of SE-marked constructions over non-SE-marked constructions is pragmatically driven.