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This work is framed within the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995 and subsequent work) and takes as its empirical domain certain patterns of reflexivization in Spanish. Concretely, it focuses on a fact that has not received due attention in the literature as is the impossibility of reflexivizing the direct object of ditransitive constructions in presence of a dative clitic (e.g., *Juan se le entregó a la policía vs. Juan se entregó a la policía intended: “John surrendered to the police”). Assuming that the dative clitic indicates that the goal argument is hierarchically superior to the theme argument, we propose that this phenomenon can be explained as a matter of locality in thematic assignment. This analysis has important theoretical implications regarding thematic theory in general. Basically, we claim that this provides evidence for long-distance approaches to thematic assignment under well-determined conditions of locality and activity. In addition, we discuss a putative counterexample for our relevant pattern (e.g. Juan se le entregó a María por entero, intended “John let María have him”) and show that its distribution parallel quasi-reflexive structures in Spanish (e.g., Juan se levantó “John stood up/got up”), which calls for a different syntactic analysis of this type of examples. We then sketch a derivation that would account for several morphosyntactic and interpretative properties of these cases in particular and quasi-reflexive sentences in general
