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Share Paper 2498

Impersonals with Passive Morphology
Francisco Ordóñez and Esthela Treviño
314-324 (complete paper or proceedings contents)

Abstract

This paper discusses an unusual Spanish periphrastic passive construction with impersonal SE, dubbed the Impersonal Periphrastic Passive (ImpPP). A salient and unexpected property of ImpPPs is that they fail to show object-to-subject promotion. It is shown, however, that this is not an isolated phenomenon and that there are other languages like Icelandic and Irish with a similar construction. Spanish ImpPPs behave differently when applied to monotransitive and ditransitive verbs. In monotransitives the object is required to appear with the preposition a and dativization is induced. In ditransitives, the theme object surfaces as a DP and may or may not trigger verbal agreement, and a dative goal PP argument must be obligatorily spelled out. In the paper, it is proposed that SE projects a VoiceP with an indefinite pro subject to which nominative is assigned. VoiceP has the ability to merge into a periphrastic passive and its corresponding arguments must surface as syntactic objects.

Published in

Selected Proceedings of the 13th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium
edited by Luis A. Ortiz-López
Table of contents
Printed edition: $280.00