Se middle voice and reflexives

Yucatec Spanish, a contact variety spoken in Yucatan, Mexico, carries many features that have been attributed to years of contact with Yucatec Maya. The current study investigates bilingual and monolingual speakers’ differentiation of the middle and reflexive voices in Yucatec Spanish. The Spanish middle voice is introduced with the clitic se and has two possible interpretations: the first is similar to a reflexive construction and the second communicates a change of state. In Yucatec Maya, the reflexive is marked with a reflexive suffix, and what was once referred to as a ‘middle voice’ in Yucatec Maya, is now assumed to be an anticausative construction, which can communicate that an event that has no identifiable agent. Structurally, the anticausative and reflexive constructions have no overlap in meaning or structure. A Multinomial Logistic Regression Analysis highlights statistically significant differences between monolingual and bilingual speakers, animate and inanimate agents, and verb types. I argue that this is due to semantic language contact effects: when Yucatec Spanish speakers use ‘a sí mismo’ at such high rates, it does not follow middle/reflexive voice distinctions in other varieties in Spanish. Instead, the salient distinction is the self meaning that communicates perceived reflexive meaning and agency.