Advances in formal Slavic linguistics 2017

The following paper discusses the syntactic derivation of the Slovenian impersonal
se-construction (e.g. Gradilo se je hišo.acc ‘People were building a house’). On the
one hand, the paper argues for an analysis of the construction in which all the thematic arguments selected by the predicate normally enter the syntactic derivation
(e.g. Rivero & Milojević Sheppard 2003; contra Marelj 2004; Grahek 2008). To this
end, the paper discusses the construction in relation to the causative alternation
(e.g. Alexiadou et al. 2015), which shows that agentive participation is invariably entailed in contrast to the personal variant (Gradila se je hiša.nom). On the other hand,
the paper shows that Rivero & Milojević Sheppard’s (2003) syntactic derivation is
set up in such a way that it cannot offer an explanation as to why the construction
only allows unergative verbs. In its stead, the paper offers a new analysis of the construction within the theory of the Voice domain (e.g. Legate 2014; Schäfer 2017). The
new analysis posits that se is the head of an argument-introducing thematic VoiceP
and is a separate element from the phonologically-null thematic argument that the
construction introduces. Ungrammaticality arises in the case of unaccusative verbs
because such predicates merge the null thematic argument within VP yet still combine with se, which introduces a participant variable into the derivation that cannot
be saturated.