Grammatical coding and the discursive construction of participants: Spanish passives in written press news discourse

Abstract

This paper presents a comparative analysis of two Spanish constructions that are usually characterised as passive, namely the periphrastic or attributive passive – formed with the verb ser ‘be’ plus a participle – and the reflexive passive – formed with third-person reflexive clitic se. An isomorphic functional approach is adopted whereby the inherent syntactic-semantic features of each construction are considered to be at the basis of their discourse-pragmatic uses. Using a corpus of local written news pieces from the Peninsular town of Salamanca, the grammatical expression of both the initiators and the endpoints of events in each construction is quantitatively and qualitatively analysed, paying special attention to their variable encoding and placement within the clause and the semantic correlates of formal variation. While attributive passives are used to predicate transitive events of topical endpoints, reflexive passives often conceptualise events as thetic, reducing transitivity and defocusing initiators. These meanings are projected onto the discourse-pragmatic domain by favouring different interpretations of the role of human participants, particularly with respect to their involvement in events amenable to negative judgements. This supports the hypothesis that the syntax and semantics of each grammatical construction are undetachable from its communicative potential in specific contexts.