SE-verbs, SE-forms or SE-constructions? SE and its transitional stages between morphology and syntax

The article treats a problem that has, until now, received only a minor focus in the literature on Romance SE (but see Fagan 1992): the question being wether or not the formation with SE plus verb should be analyzed as a lexical SE-verb generated via a word-formational device, as an inflectional verbal SE-form or as a syntactic SE-construction, or if none of these traditional analyses is preferred. A closer look at the characteristics of SE and the SE+verb constructions shows that SE (+verb) behaves differently and therefore must be categorized differently depending on the function the whole SE+verb construction has. Some SE+verb formations are more derivation-like (antiagentive, reflexive, reciprocal), some more inflectional (medio-passive), and some behave more like syntactic constructions (indefinite). This variable synchronic behaviour can be explained by looking at the history of the Romance SE-construction(s): one can detect a process of grammaticalization (see Mutz 2005; Russi 2008) reaching from a phase when SE was a referential object pronoun (reflexive) to a phase in which it has developed into a mere (inflectional) marker indicating a diathetic process (medio-passive), by passing through other different functional “stages” with their own structural characteristics. The different structural and distributional behaviour of SE depending on its function, thus speaks in favour of the Autonomy of Morphology.