No big deal: Situation-backgrounding uses of the Polish dative reflexive pronoun sobie/se

Abstract The aim of this paper is to work towards an account of the multiple functions of the Polish dative reflexive pronoun sobie/se in spontaneous spoken discourse. Although typically used for recipient-beneficiary marking, sobie/se fulfills a wide range of semantico-pragmatic functions, comparable to ‘ethical datives’ found across many languages. Using corpus data from spontaneous spoken registers, I analyze the potential of sobie/se to be used in situation-backgrounding functions, focusing specifically on (i) scale-lowering and normalization, (ii) generic situations and ordinariness, (iii) narrative uses. In order to explore the relations between the marker and these situation-backgrounding functions, I present a quantitative, exploratory study comparing the uses of the state/posture verb siedzieć ‘to sit’ with and without sobie/se. The results suggest that narrative and generic uses are compatible with sobie/se – yet, at the same time, restricted to specific types of genericity and narrativity. On the methodological level, the results demonstrate that quantitative empirical analyses can be successfully employed in semantico-pragmatic analyses of constructions in spoken discourse, making it possible for researchers to elaborate and falsify their qualitative results.