Reflexividad y niveles de actividad

Abstract

The interaction with body parts is a problem for coreferential analyses of the reflexive/middle marker se; since depending on the type of body part the use of se may be ruled out: (*Se) alzó la ceja ‘He raised his eyebrow’/Se (*Ø) limpió la cara He cleaned his face’. This paper discusses a well known proposal by Langacker (1968) and its later restatement by Wierzbicka (1988) following Garcia (1975); and makes an alternate proposal: the contrast between active and non-active body parts are broad manifestations of the deeper scheme of distinguishability; a notion independently needed to account for other transitivity; middle and reflexive problems. The paper follows the tenets of Cognitive Grammar (Langacker 1988; 1991 and collaborators). It shows that this notion not only accounts for French; Polish and Spanish but it also explains in a natural manner the lack of se with non-active body parts that constituted an insolvable problem for the active/non-active distinction sustained in different ways by previous analyses.