Poniendo el ‘foco’ en la pasiva perifrástica. Estructura informativa en las oraciones pasivas del español

Abstract

Poniendo el 'foco' en la pasiva perifrástica. Estructura informativa en las oraciones pasivas del español 'Focusing' on periphrastic passives. Information structure of passive sentences in Spanish

Grammatical Coding and the Discursive Construction of Participants: Spanish Passives in Written Press News Discourse

“…The overwhelming preference for preverbal subjects with attributive passives (94.8%) contrasts with the choice of postposition in more than half of reflexive passives (51.4%). While it is the latter result that most clearly deviates from the prototypical pattern in transitive clauses, passives with ser have in fact been shown to have higher rates of preverbal subjects than active intransitive clauses (Belloro 2020: 123), which confirms the existence of wide differences between both constructions as regards syntactic configuration. The results need to be seen in relation to other contextual features in order to elucidate how the endpoint is semantically conceptualised and projected onto discourse with each of them.…”

“…The formal expression of the initiator is rarely required and is in fact the less frequent option, in Spanish as in other languages with analogous constructions (Keenan & Dryer 2007: 332). It has been noted that the use of ser passives has much to do with the arrangement of information within the clause and the contextual topicality or salience of the endpoint (Fernández 2007: 118–23; Belloro 2020: 112–4). The tendency of an endpoint subject to appear at the beginning of the clause usually correlates with the fact that it is the participant being talked about, while the rest of the clause – including the initiator if it appears – will be seen as the information that is predicated of it.…”

“…However, this language – unlike English – tends to give primacy to the pragmatic mode over the syntactic one, as described by Givón (1979: 102). This means that the ordering of constituents is primarily determined by the semantic features of their referents and their discursive status rather than by syntactic function itself (Contreras 1976, Gutiérrez Bravo 2008, Belloro 2020). In this sense, preverbal vs. postverbal placement has been shown to correlate more closely with contextual accessibility than with syntactic function (e.g.…”

Motivaciones para la posición variable del sujeto en guaraní paraguayo

“…Como es tipológicamente esperable (Lambrecht 1994), las primeras estructuras son las más frecuentes. Como se ilustra en ( 16), los referentes denotados por los sujetos sintácticos preverbales (el animal, el hombre, el niño) denotan referentes cognitivamente activos (Belloro 2012) y sirven de tópico oracional respecto del cual se predica pragmáticamente un foco que coincide con el predicado sintáctico. (Texto 8, Aguilera Jiménez 2020: 105)…”

Entre pasivas e impersonales: las cláusulas con -wa del yaqui

“…Además, (iv) hay ciertas restricciones sobre el tipo de verbo que puede pasivizarse; (v) las pasivas son menos frecuentes en corpus; y (vi) se dice que su uso está motivado por factores pragmáticos, ya sea en términos de la desfocalización del agente o la topicalización del paciente (pero cfr. Belloro, 2020).…”