Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

ON THE FREQUENCY OF PASSIVE CONSTRUCTIONS IN MODERN SPANISH

1975; Liverpool University Press; Volume: 52; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/1475382752000352345

1469-3550

John N. Green,

Abstract It is widely believed, in Spain and abroad, that the passive is rarely used in standard Castilian. Alonso del Río, for instance, tells us that ‘en nuestro idioma se hace un empleo muy limitado de la voz pasiva’.Seco has, ‘La voz pasiva refleja es en español mucho más frecuente que la formada con el verbo ser, que, por su parte, es una construcción prácticamente rara’. Ramsey considers that the formal passive is not much used ‘because of the number of equivalent constructions’. Harmer and Norton quote the Academy and suggest, ‘The passive is often replaced by the reflexive’. BSS Subject Index: SPAIN — LANGUAGES — SPANISH LANGUAGE & ITS HISTORY — GENERAL 1This paper is a much abbreviated version of a chapter of my doctoral thesis, The Reflexive-Passive relationship in Spanish (York 1972). The results have been rearranged and in a few respects reinterpreted. I am most grateful to F. W. Hodcroft and R. Wright for detailed and constructive comments on an earlier draft; remaining infelicities are of course my own. 1This paper is a much abbreviated version of a chapter of my doctoral thesis, The Reflexive-Passive relationship in Spanish (York 1972). The results have been rearranged and in a few respects reinterpreted. I am most grateful to F. W. Hodcroft and R. Wright for detailed and constructive comments on an earlier draft; remaining infelicities are of course my own. Notes 1This paper is a much abbreviated version of a chapter of my doctoral thesis, The Reflexive-Passive relationship in Spanish (York 1972). The results have been rearranged and in a few respects reinterpreted. I am most grateful to F. W. Hodcroft and R. Wright for detailed and constructive comments on an earlier draft; remaining infelicities are of course my own. 2J. Alonso del Río, Gramática española (Madrid 1963), 188. 3R. Seco, Manual de gramática española, rev. M. Seco (Madrid 1967), 182. 4M. M. Ramsey, A Textbook of Modern Spanish, 2nd ed. rev. R. K. Spaulding (London 1958), 385. 5L. C. Harmer and F. J. Norton, A Manual of Modern Spanish, 2nd ed. (London 1957). 170. 6K. L. J. Mason, Advanced Spanish Course (London-Oxford 1967), 276. 7Published in successive issues of El domingo del A.B.C. (Madrid, 4 and 11 January 1970). 1Real Academia Española, Gramática española (Madrid 1931), 254–56. 2Professor L. C. Harmer was wont to observe, as Wandruszka reports, ‘non sans une petite pointe d'ironie, que certains grammariens français se servent abondamment de la voix passive pour la décrier: "les formes du passif sont considérées comme lourdes et peu élégantes … ”, “la forme pronominale est préférée au passif … ”.’ The French Language. Studies presented to Lewis Charles Harmer, ed. T. G. S. Combe and P. Rickard (London 1970), 123. 3H. Keniston, Spanish Syntax List (New York 1937). 4J. Svartvik, On Voice in the English Verb (The Hague 1966). This is of course not to suggest that the passive is under-discussed in Spanish—rather the contrary. All reference grammars have sections on the passive and there are numerous fragmentary studies in article form. The key works are perhaps: A. Castro, ‘La pasiva refleja en español’, Hispania, I (1918), 81–85; G. Cirot, ‘ “Ser” et “estar” avec un participe passé’, Mélanges Brunot, rep. (Geneva 1972), 57–69; S. Hamplová, Algunos problemas de la voz perifrástica pasiva y las perífrasis factitivas en español (Prague 1970); F. Hanssen, ‘La pasiva castellana’, Anales de la Universidad de Chile, CXXXI (1912), 97–112, 507–14; S. Kärde, Quelques manières d'exprimer l'idée d'un sujet indéterminé ou général en espagnol (Uppsala 1943); R. Lenz, La oración y sus partes (Madrid 1920); W. Matthies, Die aus den intransitiven Verben der Bewegung und dem Partizip des Perfektes gebildeten Umschreibung im Spanischen (Jena 1933); H. Mendeloff, ‘The passive voice in Old Spanish’, RJ, XV (1964), 269–87; S. G. Morley, ‘Modern uses of ser and estar’, PMLA, XL (1925), 450–89; H. F. Muller, ‘The passive voice in Vulgar Latin’, RR, XV (1924), 68–93; E. Oca, ‘Explicación lógica de los verbos impersonales’, BRAE, I (1914), 457–67; G. Reichenkron, Passivum, Medium und Reflexivum in den romanischen Sprachen (Leipzig 1933); M. Wandruszka, ‘Stare in den romanischen Sprachen’, ZRP, LXXXI (1965), 423–40. References to related topics may be found in H. Serís, Bibliografía de la lingüística española (Bogotá 1964), 358–60. 5S. Letelier, ‘La voz pasiva en castellano’, Anales de la Universidad de Chile, LXXXIV (1893), 853–57. S. Gili y Gaya, Curso superior de sintaxis española, 9th ed. (Barcelona 1964), 123. 1 Cf. ‘Constraining Spanish surface structure’, York Papers in Linguistics, IV (1974), 141–47 and ‘Reflections on Spanish reflexives’, Lingua, XXXV (1975), 345–91. 2No account is taken of the other circumlocutions advocated for avoiding the passive (uno, la gente, indeterminate third person plurals etc.) since (a) these have a very restricted range of substitutability with passives and (b) it seems clear that the passive value does not in fact survive the substitution. Dicen que la mató has, by design, an indeterminate subject but it is no more passive than Shaw's ‘They say he done her in’ (Pygmalion, Act II). Rather than seeing indeterminates as passive, we should view the passive as one of the methods whereby the subject of the main verb need not be mentioned. Even so, the strictly formal criteria by which passives were selected for this inquiry do force the inclusion of a few expressions whose passive value may be doubted (e.g. estoy agradecido, satisfecho, etc.)—fortunately these are of so low occurrence as to be insignificant for statistical purposes. 1Thus e.g. se hace/está haciéndose /se haga/vaya haciéndose all count as Ps; similarly for perfect (Pf), future (Ft), imperfect (Im), preterite (Pr), pluperfect (Pl) and conditional (Cd). Forms in -ara/-iera are treated as conditional. Only the present and imperfect had reasonably large numbers of examples in the subjunctive and/or continuous forms, but compared with the respective incidence of simple indicatives they are still an insignificant percentage. ‘Infinitives’ (Inf) include perfect and continuous forms as well as presents, e.g. haberse levantado, ir fijándose, haber sido elegido. Under ‘Participles’ (Par), for classes A, B, C2 and D are included compound forms, e.g. habiendo sido condenado, quedando reducido; simple past participles are by definition C1. The ‘Other’ column includes impera tives, the little-used tenses (future perfect, conditional perfect, past anterior, etc.) and a very few curiosities of passive meaning (e.g. una cuestión sin resolver); most of the class A examples in this column are imperatives. 2E. Benot, ‘Signo de pasiva SE’, La España moderna, XVI (1904), 104–15. 1W. E. Bull el al., ‘Modern Spanish verb-form frequencies’, Hispania, XXX (1947), 451–66. 2I amalgamate some of his categories to make the results comparable. 1It is far from clear how many scholars would espouse this hypothesis in its strongest form—which would mean that every estar-passive was derived transformationally from an underlying ser-passive. S. Babcock seems to be suggesting as much in The Syntax of Spanish Reflexive Verbs (The Hague 1970), 57–59. The transformation would be optional, and the fact that quite high numbers of both ser-perfects and estar–presents were recorded in our sample would mean that underlying (or, more properly, intermediate level) ser-perfects are very common and not all authors exercise their option to convert them. However, the sample also contains a few ester-passives in the future perfect, pluperfect and past anterior; it is not at all evident whence they may arise. 2The three persons, singular and plural, are numbered i to vi in the usual order (yo, tú, él, nosotros, vosotros, ellos); the so-called ‘polite’ form of the semantic second person, usted/ustedes, appear as iiP/vP respectively; and for third persons, singular and plural, animate (A) and inanimate (I) subjects are distinguished. The figures in the right-hand column give the more conventional groupings, thus 86.2 is the percentage of class A which is third person, whether singular or plural, animate or inanimate (excluding of course usted/ustedes examples, which as stated above, are considered as second person). 1Some of the detail available in Table 3, which is analytical, has had to be sacrificed when working out projections, since the actual numbers in some cells are very small. 1Confirmed by H. Contreras in her review of M. J. Goldin, Spanish Case and Function (Georgetown 1968): Lingua, XXV (1970), 12–29. 1That, at least, is the opinion of most reference grammars, though E. Lorenzo has collected modern data suggesting that intercalations are becoming more frequent: El español de hoy, lengua en ebullición (Madrid 1966), 153–60. 1The high frequency of poder is partly due to the method of collection since, contrary to usual practice, combinations like se puede cantar were classed under poder rather than cantar, on the grounds that se puede alone is grammatical, and any dependent infinitive can usually be pronominalized as se lo puede. 2Even so, the choice of auxiliary seems to be restricted, and certainly no active form is possible: *El hombre ha inexplorado varias comarcas. 1From the standard deviation can be calculated the Coefficient of Variation (v=100σ/x) and it is this measure we use here. The resulting percentages for the four classes are: A = 22.31, B = 87.32, C = 39.07 and D = 41.67. 2The Chi-square test, in slightly modified form, was applied to the various parameters of variation accessible in this investigation. As the results and argument are lengthy, I have written them up in a separate article, ‘Towards a statistical delimitation of register in Spanish’ (forthcoming in International Review of Applied Linguistics).