La impersonalidad en el español actual y sus recursos

Abstract

The Spanish language has at its disposal various forms that serve to express impersonality. The objective of this article is to identify the syntactic, semantic and syntactic-semantic ways of impersonal expression and to analyse the frequency of their use within contemporary texts, published between years 1980 and 2020, of the literary, publicistic and scientific functional style. Coming to the conclusion, for both publicistic and scientific functional styles it is the category of the semantic impersonality that becomes more typical with, approximately, 40% of occurrences in each functional style in total. In comparison, the syntactic impersonal way of expression is most typical for the literary functional style with 60,8% of its examples in general. As for the least developed categories, while the syntactic- semantic ways of impersonal expression are found to the least extent in the publicistic and also in the literary functional style, for the scientific functional style is the category of the syntactic impersonality. To sum up, the impersonal expression is documented the most in the publicistic functional style, on the other hand, it is the literary functional style in which the lowest number of impersonal forms is registered in total.