Part of
Deixis and Pronouns in Romance LanguagesEdited by Kirsten Jeppesen Kragh and Jan Lindschouw
[Studies in Language Companion Series 136] 2013
► pp. 109–124
Edited by Kirsten Jeppesen Kragh and Jan Lindschouw
[Studies in Language Companion Series 136] 2013
► pp. 109–124
The Spanish impersonal se-construction
Constructional motivation for case-marking – quantitative evidence
According to the new edition of the Spanish Academy Grammar (Bosque 2009: 1220ff,2665), it remains unexplained why the clitic object in the Spanish impersonal transitive se-construction tends to be in dative (le): se le ve ‘you can see him’. The aim of this paper is to analyze this usage quantitatively, with focus on its constructional motivation. To achieve solid empirical evidence, I extracted large amounts of data from Corpus del Español (20.4 mill. words) and analyzed the data statistically. I found that the constructional motivation for the dative is substantial and that it is due to characteristics of the specific impersonal se-construction.
Cited by
Cited by 2 other publications
Albelda Marco, Marta
2016. La expresión de la evidencialidad en la construcciónse ve (que). Spanish in Context 13:2 ► pp. 237 ff. 
Wiesinger, Evelyn
2021. The Spanish verb-particle construction [V para atrás]. In Constructions in Contact 2 [Constructional Approaches to Language, 30], ► pp. 140 ff.
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