‘Focusing’ on periphrastic passives. Information structure of passive sentences in Spanish

Abstract

This study examines the functional motivations behind the use of periphrastic ser passives in Spanish, based on a corpus of spontaneous data analyzed in their context of occurrence. It is argued that traditional hypotheses in terms of agent-defocusing and/or patient-topicalizing do not capture usage data with the expected regularity, nor allow for describing the functional specificity of passives vs. alternative constructions. Instead, it is proposed that passives serve basically to “unanchor” the syntactic object from the position of assignment of information focus, in order to create a “vacant focal space” typically with the purpose of introducing another focal element, be it the agent or some other oblique. We propose that this perspective explains why, in natural discourse, (i) the postverbal space is typically occupied, (ii) it is not occupied by more than one constituent, (iii) “minimal” passives are marginal, and (iv), differently from other intransitive subjects, passive subjects do not occur postverbally.