La variabilidad entre la construcción pasiva y la impersonal de se. Isomorfismo e interpretación contextual

Resum

The apparent unstability between Spanish passive and impersonal se clauses, together with their common pragmatic function of defocusing the initiator of the event, have often promoted their consideration as variants of the same construction. However, formalist and cognitive-functional models stress the relevance of whether there is verbal agreement or not; besides, descriptive grammar had already suggested semantic differences between them. In this paper, an intrinsically variable approach is proposed, starting from the core meaning of the reflexive construction, namely the internalization of the event within its semantic endpoint. When the predicate prompts the inference of an external initiator, var-ious factors related to transitivity favor the interpretation of the clause as similar to middle constructions (in the uses described as passive) or rather to active transitive ones (in imper-sonal contexts). This is therefore a gradual phenomenon whose understanding requires the combination of an isomorphic model with the analysis of contextual variation.