Marta Pino Moreno - Linguistic Research

Marta Pino Moreno

Lingüista y traductora

Doctora en Filología Hispánica

Linguist and Translator

PhD in Spanish Filology

Linguistic Research

PhD Thesis

PhD in Spanish Philology and Linguistics with Accreditation of «Doctor Europeus», 11 July 2000, Santiago de Compostela University

Title

Las construcciones pasivas e impersonales transitivas en español

(Passive and Transitive Impersonal Structures in Spanish)

Abstract

This PhD thesis is a corpus-based research on Spanish passive and transitive impersonal clauses, within a functionalist framework, Role and Reference Grammar, adapted in order to describe some specific Spanish features. The corpus includes newspaper, radio and television texts, recorded or published in Spain between 1982 and 1997. 1351 different verbs in 13505 passive or impersonal clauses (13117 passives and 388 transitive impersonal) have been found in the corpus. There are 30 parameters of analysis for each clause, grouped into 10 sets of variables. All data have been statistically processed.

Some results concerning 3 of the variables (clause type and subtype, event structure, register) will be shown in the next paragraphs.

Clause type frequencies are different from what most Spanish grammars claim: past participle passives (57.8%) are more common than se-passives (39.4%), and the latter are more frequent than transitive impersonals (2.9%). As far as auxiliary verbs are concerned, ser is the most frequent one, followed by estar, verse, quedar, sentirse, venir, salir, resultar, encontrarse, ir and permanecer.

A complex event structure taxonomy has been designed in this thesis. It includes 23 types of event, based on the Vendler (1957 [1967]) taxonomy. The corpus shows that telic events (achievements and accomplishments) are often encoded as passive clauses, while passives linked to non-telic events (activities) are less frequent. Secondly, differences between se-passives and past participle passives cannot be described in terms of presence/absence of generic events. Lastly, each auxiliary verb constrains the range of possible events for the past participle.

The density of past participle passives is higher in newspaper texts than in radio or television programmes, while the density of se-passives and impersonals is higher in spoken than in written media. There are more lexical and syntactic shortcomings in radio and television style, compared to the newspaper discourse.