Review of 'Understanding and teaching reflexive sentences (Routledge 2022)

Abstract

The monograph Understanding and Teaching reflexive sentences in Spanish, by Luis H. González (2022) constitutes a proposal for an integral theory of se-constructions in Spanish to help L2 learners of Spanish understand the diversity of constructions. The core of the theory, which is strongly semantically oriented, proposes that se-structures always involve the substitution of the external argument –which is called 'verber' in the book–,not of the internal argument. As such, the proposal sets itself apart from the vast majority of theories about SE structures, and has non trivial similarities with the proposal in Oca (1914), which has been adapted in recent times by Ormazabal & Romero (2019, 2021). In what follows, I will first review the core assumptions of this proposal (§1), then I will move to how this proposal reassesses the types of se-constructions described in the usual grammars (§2); §3 presents some discussion about the core ideas in this theory, and §4 concludes with comments about other aspects of the book.