On an anomalous passive in Spanish

Abstract

The present work focuses on a construction in Spanish, censured by grammarians, which combines the morphology of the analytical or periphrastic passive (ser ‘be’ + participle) with the multifunctional reflexive morpheme se and typically serves to generalize over processes affecting classes of things or groups of individuals (La energía incrementa cuando se es contenida ‘Energy increases when (it is) contained’). Our interest in the genesis of the construction leads us to locate its source in a regular structure of the language, known as the “impersonal reflexive with a passive clause”, wherein se marks the unspecified identity of the patient subject (cuando se es amado…‘when one is loved...’). Viewed from this angle, the “deviant” feature of the construction in study thus resides in the introduction of an explicit subject, which has the effect of erasing the impersonal character of the source and of altering the function of se in ways that will impose a reference to the so-called reflexive passive of Spanish. In the second part of our research, we seek to account for the productivity of the anomalous construction, discovered through our perusal in Google, by calling attention to the instrumental role played by the participle in allowing shifts of perspective between passive actions and resulting states. We discuss some examples to corroborate our hypothesis, highlight the expansion of the construction to non-generic contexts and, as our final task, take on the challenge of having to explain how the anomalous passive comes to be used with intransitive unaccusative verbs, as evidenced in the data of our corpus.