Construcciones españolas con sey la interpretación de propiedad

Abstract

This work focuses on a variety of Spanish se constructions which are often assigned a property interpretation and which are usually referred to as passive middle ( Esta camisa se lava muy bien ) and impersonal middle structures ( A los politicos se les soborna facilmente ). On the basis of a nonlogical conception of the sentence and a genuinely functional understanding of sentential syntactic functions, our goals are: (1) to demonstrate that it is not convenient to characterize the so-called passive middle constructions as passive nor the so-called impersonal middle constructions as impersonal; (2) to establish the role of information structure and modality in the property interpretation of these structures; (3) to determine the function of se in this type of constructions, specifically,whether or not this function is related with the property interpretation and whether it manages to distinguish these structures from other se constructions, and (4) to define the requirements that verbs occurring in this type of structures must fulfill.