Escobar Álvarez, M. &. & Teomiro García, I. I.
Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED)
Anticausatives require the clitic ?se? in Spanish. In contrast, other kinds of verbs (consumption and certain intransitives like ?caer(se)? and ?morir(se)?) optionally allow for this clitic. Data from L1 acquisition show that children have no difficulty with obligatory ?se?. Besides, experimental data support the hypothesis that children find the clitic ?se? easier with anticausative than with transitive verbs. Furthermore, the acquisition of optional clitic ?se? is also problematic, since children tend not to use it at all, while there are no such omissions when ?se? is obligatory. It could be argued that the difficulties with clitic ?se? are due to its optional character. However, other configurations with obligatory ?se? are also acquired at later stages provided data from CHILDES. In adult syntax, clitic ?se? with anticausatives is argued to be an inflexion element inserted in the derivation due to formal reasons. In contrast, other syntactic configurations with ?se? have in common the fact that ?se? is within a low applicative phrase and assigned dative Case. If we consider the Czech clitic ?si? as the equivalent counterpart of Spanish ?se?, we observe that it is also marked as dative in this second language. Hence, we think that there is also a low applicative phrase in the later acquired configurations. Hence, we want to put forward a twofold analysis of clitic ?se?: as an expletive and as a dative clitic argument. We assume that the difficulty we found with the latter is due to the fact that it is within a low applicative phrase. We assume that this complex derivation needs some time to be acquired. Actually, if the optional character of ?se? was the reason for children?s difficulty, some acquisition data would be unexpected since ?se? in ?romperse la quisma? (break your head) is equally compulsory in adult grammar.