Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2011, Spanish and Portuguese

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, (#SE) estaba comiendo unos tacos pero todavia no le servian ‘Yesterday I saw Sergio, he was about to (#SE) eat some tacos but they hadn't been served yet' (2) a. Marta se comio diez tacos de lengua b. #Marta comio diez tacos de lengua ‘Marta (#SE) ate ten tongue tacos' 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 (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Scott Schwenter PhD (Advisor); Terrell Morgan PhD (Other); Laura Wagner PhD (Other) Subjects: Linguistics