Perspectiva sistémico-funcional de los usos de 'se' en español

Multimodal Texts from Around the World

“…In our corpus the 'se...' structure was more frequently used than the direct translation into Spanish seen in Illustration 12.1, with a ratio of five to one. The interpretation of the different uses of the pronominal form se has been one of the most studied topics in the Spanish language (Alarcos Llorach, 1987;Arús, 2006;Barrenechea and de Rossetti, 1969;Real Academia Española, 1986, to mention just a few). The pronominal se can be used to fulfil many functions; some of them are well differentiated, such as the reflexive/ reciprocal, but others have fuzzy contrasts, as in the case discussed here.…”

Construing experience in Spanish: Revisiting a Systemic Functional Description of Spanish Nuclear Transitivity

“…These are the impersonal 'se', the 'se' passives (or reflex passives), periphrastic passives, and impersonal 3 person plural. Examples (27) to (30) illustrate the structure of these different realizations, which have been thoroughly described in the literature (Cano, 1981;Alarcos, 1987Alarcos, , 1999Seco, 1996;Molina, 1997;Gómez, 1998;Mendikoetxea, 1999Mendikoetxea, , 2002Sánchez, 2002;Arús, 2006;RAE, 2010 Goal/Medium Process: material (They) promoted me/ I was promoted…”

“…In English, it consists of the auxiliary 'be' plus the main verb in past participle form. In Spanish, in addition to this form, the passive voice can be realized with what has been called the 'reflex' or 'se' passive (Cano, 1981;Alarcos, 1987Alarcos, , 1999Seco, 1996;Arús, 2006;Real Academia de la Lengua Española, 2010), realized with the use of the 'se' clitic and the verbal group in agreement with nominal group realizing the Medium. (4b) and (4c) In Spanish, 'se' passives are more common than periphrastic passives (to be + past participle) (RAE, 2010).…”

“…Arús (2006) considers this particular use of 'se' as 'semantically empty', since it does not realize a participant in the clause. However, notice the difference in meaning in (11) and (12) While 'se' in (11) implies the explosion was an accident, in (12) the grenade carried out its intended function.…”

“…The first is remapping the different options for construing causation as more delicate choices in the system of Agency, including the feature 'Instigation' as introduced by Davidse (1992) and differentiated from 'Initiation' as proposed by Halliday (1968). The second is to include a typological difference of Spanish, which although discussed in this and previous works (Arús, 2006) has not been mapped into their system network. It is what will be called 'the ER participant explicitness' category, which allows speaker to choose whether to present central participants to the clause configuration explicitly or obliquely.…”