Eckhard Bick - VISL

a [a] DET F S @>N ‘-’
violência [violência] N F S @P< ‘violence’
$.
A special case of "weak" pre-positioned subject candidates are relative pronouns which
often do function as @ACC>. Here, both analyses seem to be acceptable:
(5g) o que @ACC> se @SUBJ> deve fazer ('what one has to do')
(5g') o que @SUBJ> se @ACC-PASS> deve fazer ('what has to be done')
(5h) hoje, o que @ACC> se @SUBJ> busca, é um emprego ..., ('today, what one is
looking for, is a job ...,')
(5h') hoje, o que @SUBJ> se @ACC-PASS> busca, é um emprego ..., ('today, what is
being looked for, is a job ....,')
In subclauses headed by (comparative) adverbial relatives, the case is more simple - and
biased in favour of an impersonal subject reading. Here, the direct object is always
omitted (i.e. "implied" by this type of adverbial complementiser) even with obligatorily
transitive verbs (6a-b). In the English translation, a what-object has to be added:
(6a) ..., conforme dizem, .. ('according to what they say')
(6a') ..., conforme eles dizem, .. ('according to what they say')
(6b) ..., segundo denunciou na época, .. ('according to what he said at the time')
Applying the uniqueness principle, we are then left with a natural subject reading for
"se" in (6c). An @ACC-PASS reading is ruled out by the agrammaticality of surface
objects in these constructions (6c'), and the @SUBJ reading for "se" is further backed
by the fact that no other explicit subject can be added (6c'') - in contrast with se-less
(6a') -, suggesting that the subject slot is in fact filled by se (and, implicitely, that a nonsubject
se would in this context be understood as direct, not indirect, object for estima,
producing agrammaticality for the same reasons as 6c').
(6c) conforme/segundo se @SUBJ> estima ('according to what one estimates')
(6c') *conforme/segundo o @ACC> estima ('*according to he estimates it')
(6c'') *conforme/segundo ele @SUBJ> se estima ('*according to what he estimates
himself')
In table (1), I have inspected 288 running instances of pronominal "se" from a
newspaper corpus, applying the different categories defined earlier in this chapter. The
distribution shows that the "prototypical" reflexive usage is still the most common
(about two thirds of all cases), while passive readings are rare, and the impersonal
pronoun use is as frequent as 1 in 5.
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