Abstract
Following Oca (1914), this article argues that passive and impersonal se constructions in Spanish are regular transitive constructions where the pronominal clitic seis the argumental subject. Several arguments (secondary predication, non-argumental predicates, control and obviation, anaphora binding, active morphology or its alignment with overt nominative pronouns, among others)show that (i)bothconstructions are active structures, (ii)despite what agreement facts might suggest, in both the internal argument of the verb is not the subject but the direct object throughout the derivation, (iii) se is the active nominative pronominal subject of the construction. We argue that the alleged ‘special’ properties of passive-se are not construction-specific but follow from the lexical specifications of se agreeing with Tense as a quirky subject.
Highlights
The goal of this paper is to analyze the role of SE in non-paradigmatic SE constructions in Spanish
SE left.pl Differential Object Marking (DOM) the women abused without protection effective
‘The workers' demands were left aside’. It is precisely because of this contrast that it is generally assumed that the complement in (1b) raises to subject position, while the complement in (1a) stays in object position, where it receives Differential Object Marking (DOM) (Rivero 2002)
Summary
The goal of this paper is to analyze the role of SE in non-paradigmatic SE constructions in Spanish. Specifically, we deal with so called impersonal (1a) and passive (1b) SE constructions as described in Mendikoetxea (1999) and other works. (1) a. b.
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