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Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2017: Selected papers from 'Going Romance' 31, Bucharest
Edited by Alexandru Nicolae and Adina Dragomirescu
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 355] 2021
► pp. 357–372

Syntactic vs pragmatic passive

Evidence from Romanian

| University of Bucharest | ‘Iorgu Iordan – Alexandru Rosetti’ Institute of Linguistics

This chapter discusses the relationship between the two passive constructions in Romanian (se-passive and be-passive) in a twofold comparison: old Romanian vs present-day Romanian, and standard vs substandard present-day Romanian. Stipulating the distinction ‘syntactic passive’ vs ‘pragmatic passive’, I argue that the evolution of the two competing structures illustrates a typical case of convergence and I invoke the situation in present-day subdialectal Romanian as an additional proof. In old Romanian, se-structures functioned as syntactic passives under the Slav(on)ic influence, while be-structures had a temporal or copular meaning, pragmatically implying the passive meaning. In present-day standard Romanian, be-structures are grammaticalized for the passive meaning following the influence of Western Romance languages, while se-structures have acquired an impersonal-presentative meaning, continuing to pragmatically imply the passive meaning. The situation in present-day dialectal spoken varieties, more conservative compared to standard Romanian, reflects the grammaticalization/degrammaticalization processes that affected the evolution of the two structures: while se-structures followed the long-term evolution in standard Romanian and lost their grammaticalized passive function acquiring an impersonal-presentative meaning, the more recent grammaticalization process of be-structures as passives has not fully extended to subdialectal varieties. Hence, active constructions are the preferred option across subdialects, which currently lack a grammaticalized passive construction, as the passive meaning is pragmatically implied both by se-structures and be-structures.

Keywords: Romanian, se-passive/be-passive, syntactic passive/pragmatic passive
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The evolution of se-structures
  • 3.The evolution of be-structures
  • 4.Evidence from dialectal oral varieties of Romanian
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Corpus
  • References
Published online: 1 December 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.355.18vas
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