Abstract

Romance se has long been taken to be an indicator of unaccusativity. This generalization has already been questioned for certain types of reflexives, and it was found to be too strong. An outstanding question in current studies concerns the status of se that does not obviously mark reflexivity or anticausativity. In this paper, we signal the presence of such constructions in Romanian, and propose that lack of reflexivity in the presence of se may follow from the direct merge of this element inside a DP instead of a vP. The hypothesis is that, if se merges on the nominal spine, it is orthogonal to the mapping of internal arguments or to Accusative Case, and may occur with unergatives.