Understanding and Teaching Reflexive Sentences in Spanish

Luis H. González is Professor of Spanish and Linguistics at Wake Forest University. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of California, Davis. His main areas of research are semantic roles, case, reflexivization, clitic doubling, differential object marking, dichotomies in languages, Spanish linguistics, and second language learning. He is the co-author of Gramática para la composición (Georgetown University Press), a Spanish advanced grammar and writing textbook, now in its third edition (2016). He is also the author of Cómo entender y cómo enseñar por y para (Routledge, 2020), Four Dichotomies in Spanish: Adjective Position, Adjectival Clauses, Ser/Estar, and Preterite/Imperfect (Routledge, 2021) and The Fundamentally Simple Logic of Language: Learning a Second Language with the Tools of the Native Speaker (Routledge, 2021).

List of tables

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1: Subject and direct object or verber and verbed?

1.1 Introduction

2.1 How verbed reveals a difference that subject hides

3.1 Sentences with three participants

Chapter 2: Turning reflexivization on its head

2.1. Introduction

2.2. Reflexivization: more than meets the eye

2.3. Reflexivization turned upside down

2.4. How Estela se parece a su mamá is not an idiom; it is similar to Estela se sirvió un café

2.5. Does a reflexive pronoun replace the direct object/indirect object or the subject?

2.6. An intransitivizing pronoun replaces the verber, not the subject

2.7. Conclusions

2.8. Exercises

2.9. Answers to the exercises

Chapter 3: How the intransitivizing se accounts for true reflexive se, but not the other way around

3.1. The view from above: against the need for the ten to 15 different functions of se

3.2. You can drink up your coffee but you cannot *drink up coffee

3.3. Conclusions

3.4. Exercises

3.5. Answers to the exercises

Chapter 4: Other "functions" of se: Can telling your name in another language be an idiom?

4.1. On gone, goer, goner, fallen, dead

4.2. Can telling your name in another language be an idiom?

4.3. Can we, please, never ever again explain in a textbook for Spanish the accidental or unplanned se?

4.4. Conclusions

4.5. Exercises

4.6. Answers to the exercises

Chapter 5: Bringing together coreference reflexives, decausative reflexives, impersonal passives, and inherently reflexive verbs

5.1. How verber intransitivization brings together coreference reflexives, decausative reflexives, impersonal se, and inherently reflexive verbs

5.2. The 11 types of intransitivized sentences with a reflexive pronoun in Spanish (§ 3.1) and in ten other languages

5.3 A smaller set of sentences intransitivized with an intransitivizing pronoun in 20 other languages

5.4. Conclusions

Index