The role of SE in Spanish agreement variation

Abstract

This paper analyses Spanish agreement variation in non-paradigmatic SE structures. It is argued that in European Spanish the attested alternation between agreement and lack of agreement is part of a single grammar, i.e. a case of intra-speaker optionality. To support this claim it is shown that neither definiteness nor Case assignment are responsible for the lack of agreement pattern. The proposal combines two basic ingredients: the special featural configuration of SE (Mendikoetxea 1999, D'Alessandro 2008 and the parametrization of the order of syntactic operations (Obata et al. 2015, Obata & Epstein 2016. This analysis reflects the asymmetries with respect to Italian and Icelandic data and is compatible with a similar case of variation in Spanish dat-nom psych-verb structures.