Expletive Passive Structures in English and Spanish. A Corpus-Based Study
The present study is concerned with the comparative analysis of the morphological, syntactic and discourse properties attributed to the expletive passive construction in English and the passive structure incorporating se in Spanish —both of which diverge markedly from the canonical clause structure...
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| Tipo de recurso: | tesis de maestría |
| Estado: | Versión aceptada para publicación |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2025 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | Universidad de Sevilla (US) |
| Repositorio: | idUS. Depósito de Investigación de la Universidad de Sevilla |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:idus.us.es:11441/177231 |
| Acceso en línea: | https://hdl.handle.net/11441/177231 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Contrastive Linguistics Corpus-Based Study Expletive Passive Se There Lingüística Contrastiva Análisis de Corpus Pasiva Expletiva |
| Sumario: | The present study is concerned with the comparative analysis of the morphological, syntactic and discourse properties attributed to the expletive passive construction in English and the passive structure incorporating se in Spanish —both of which diverge markedly from the canonical clause structure to which their respective grammatical systems are aligned (i.e., SVO). In this framework, the study seeks to determine, through the examination of a manually compiled corpus, the extent to which these configurations exhibit discourse-syntactic equivalence. To this end, particular attention is given to the characterisation of the introductory proforms embedded in each structure —specifically, the English expletive there and the Spanish clitic se—, alongside an evaluation of their potential expletive status and the telic orientation of their associated predicates. In effect, the findings of this work provide compelling evidence for the existence of convergent formal patterns between them, most notably in the analysis of the Spanish clitic as an argumental expletive element that is formally analogous to its English counterpart. The study, therefore, advances a novel contribution to the field of contrastive Theoretical Linguistics, underscoring the efficacy of empirical cross-linguistic analysis in furnishing a more nuanced understanding of expletive marking mechanisms across structurally divergent languages. |
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