The Meaning of Inchoative se in Brazilian Portuguese: A Replication of Lundquist et al.'s (2016) Experiment

In the well-known causative alternation, a verb appears either in a causative-transitive or in an inchoative-intransitive form. The inchoative form is marked with a reflexive clitic in some languages, such as Norwegian, but is unmarked in others, such as English. There are two main proposals to explain the alternation: a lexical-derivational account (a lexical rule is responsible for the demotion of the cause argument), and a syntactic-derivational one (in a type of reflexivization, the theme/patient is construed as responsible for causing the event). A third type of approach posits that the alternation emerges when a verb can be found in different constructions and no derivation is involved. Lundquist et al. (Glossa J Gen Linguist 1:1-30, 2016) put the first two approaches to experimental testing and found that while the decausativization approach is adequate for English, the reflexivization approach explains the Norwegian facts. The present experimental study investigates which proposal is adequate to explain the alternation in Brazilian Portuguese. Differently from both English and Norwegian, Brazilian Portuguese allows reflexive-marked and unmarked inchoatives with the same verb. In a replication of Lundquist et al.'s (Glossa J Gen Linguist 1:1-30, 2016) experiment, our results show that Brazilian Portuguese assigns distinct meanings to the two forms of the inchoative. We conclude that the reflexive pronoun se indicates that the change of state described in the inchoative sentence was caused by some entity, but not an agent. We then argue that a non-derivational approach explains the alternation, as a single verb occurs in distinct syntactic configurations, with distinct meaning implications.