The reflexive constructions that are the focus of this book are the constructions broadly described with the term “middle”: i.e., those that can appear in all persons, and in which the reflexive marker (RM) cannot be understood as a full referential pronoun. One goal of this study is to provide a corpus-based typology of middle and related uses that allow us to compare the behaviour of the RM in these constructions with previous typological accounts, where competing models (based either on changes of diathesis or on the semantics of the verbal event) can be found. A second goal is to shed light on the evolution of the different functions of the RM, by exploring the factors that affect its productivity, with a specific focus on those verbs where reflexive marking is most variable, that is, anticausative verbs and verbs with no change of valency. These reflexive constructions show a notable difference in productivity in Spanish and Galician, although the languages are closely related and contiguous. The languages are thus good candidates for a contrastive and variationist analysis serving these two goals. The semantic class of the predicate, its aspectual properties and the animacy of the subject are some of the most relevant factors that are taken into account to understand the motivations behind the presence or absence of the RM. By relying on a corpus of interviews from rural communities across peninsular Spain (except Catalonia), space as a relevant extra-linguistic variable is taken into account, helping uncover previously unknown geographical patterns.

The goal of this paper is to revisit the so-called aspectual se, frequently cited over the last three decades as a new function of reflexive pronouns in Spanish and other languages, which refers to facultative uses of the reflexive pronoun where it has no effect on the valency or diathesis of the verb. I will focus on four empirical problems that such accounts face when dealing with corpus data: the requirement of a delimited object for transitive verbs, the semantic implications of the aspectual function of the reflexive pronoun, the unacceptability of the reflexive pronoun with some predicates, and the fact that these accounts have ignored a number of predicates that also take this facultative reflexive pronoun. I argue that a larger sample of both contexts and verbs, obtained by exhaustively analyzing corpus data, is necessary to improve our understanding of these uses.

In this paper I provide a description of the reflexive syncretism found in some Spanish and Catalan neighbouring varieties. In these varieties, the 3 rd person reflexive pronoun se can also appear with 1 st person plural and 2 nd person plural verbs. With dialectal data from the Audible and Spoken Corpus of Rural Spanish (COSER), the Linguistic Atlas of the Iberian Peninsula (ALPI) and from works of other scholars I analyse the distribution of the syncretism in order to establish what person (the 1 st plural or the 2 nd plural) it affected first. I also analyse this syncretism in other Romance languages, in order to see if the person hierarchies previously proposed in the literature are confirmed by these varieties.

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This paper is concerned with the pronominalization of the patient in reflexive passives and reflexive impersonals in Peninsular Spanish. It is commonly agreed that only human patients can pronominalize in these contexts in Standard Peninsular Spanish. However, some varieties show full pronominalization of non-human patients. This paper aims to describe the geographical distribution of this pronominalization in Peninsular Spanish, together with the evolution of this phenomenon. Dialectal data allow describing the evolution of linguistic phenomena by means of investigating their geographical spreading in different contexts. The data contained in this paper show that the pronominalization of the patient in reflexive indefinite agent constructions (namely, reflexive passives and reflexive impersonals) is related to the animacy hierarchy, connecting this phenomenon with the more general category of agreement.