Gli impieghi non riflessivi di <i>se</i>/<i>sibi</i> nelle lingue romanze: dati e teoria

Abstract The aim of the article is to investigate the non-coreferential uses of the Latin reflexive pronoun se / sibi in the Romance languages. In prepositional phrases, the stressed form of this pronoun replaces the outcomes of illu(m) in Ibero-Romance, Gallo-Romance and Gallo-Italic, whereas its unstressed form is used in place of illu(m) as the Indirect Object in Castilian and Sardinian (as part of a clitic cluster) and in southernmost Calabrese (as isolated pronoun). Furthermore, the outcomes of se / sibi also convey Direct and/or Indirect Objects of 1st and 2nd person plural in several areas of the Romance domain. We argue that this multifunctionality is related to the morphological gender and number neutrality characterising this pronoun, whose syntactic role is clarified by either prepositions or verbal valency. Moreover, as a 3rd person marker, it also develops the so-called «non-person» feature (as claimed by Benveniste), designating a generic reference, of which plurality represents only one of its possible realisations.