Impersonal Passive "Se" in Spanish

Within the last twenty years and in the framework of transformational grammar at least seven kinds of se have been proposed: spurious se, reflexive se, reciprocal se, pronominal se, impersonal se, passive se and se moyen. Each of these se's shows its own syntactic and semantic characteristics. In this article, in the framework of the Theory of Government and Binding, an eighth type of se, the impersonal passive se, is proposed. Similar to the passive se, it is passive in interpretation; however, unlike passive se, and similar to the impersonal se, it has an impersonal subject. The different syntactic properties this new se exhibits are shown to follow from the principles of universal grammar.