The Passive in Modern Spanish – Aspect of the Verb?
Daniel J.S. Honert (St Andrews)
The passive has traditionally been considered a voice of the verb, i.e. as being derived from an
underlying active sentence, with which it is thought to be synonymous: for Spanish see e. g. de
Bruyne (1995: 460-461). The voice analysis attempts to explain why it is that the grammatical subject
in passive sentences is understood as the object of the action denoted by the verb (Mendikoetxea
1999: 1636). Because the underlying active sentence must necessarily contain an object, according to
the voice analysis, all and only transitive verbs can form a passive. There are, however, transitive
verbs which do not passivize. The following two sentences will serve as an example for Spanish:
(a)
La asociación cuenta ya medio siglo de vida.
(b)
*Medio siglo de vida ya es contado por la asociación.
My native speaker informants have rejected (b) as being ungrammatical, which makes contar an
exception to the passive rule.
The purpose of my research is to identify all non-passivizable transitive Spanish verbs and to look
for an explanation for their non-passivizability. Beedham´s (1982, 2005) research suggests that the
passive in English, German and Russian is an aspect of the verb of the type auxiliary + participle,
which denotes a new state as the result of a preceding action, and that only telic verbs passivize.
Telic verbs have a built-in endpoint in their meaning, which becomes the end-state of the passive
meaning ‘action + state’. My work attempts to find out if his findings apply equally to Spanish. With
the help of my native speaker informants I have so far identified 18 non-passivizable transitive verbs.
Once I have established a comprehensive list of non-passivizable transitive verbs I will test them
against a periphrastic construction with aspectual meaning, viz. tener + 2nd participle. This
grammatical unit is an ideal testing ground for an aspectual analysis of the passive because of the
aspectual meaning of Spanish verbal periphrases in general (cf. Yllera 1999), and more specifically,
the resultative character of tener + 2nd participle (cf. Vera-Morales 2004: 321, de Bruyne 1995: 555,
de Miguel 1999: 3008). If my hypothesis (ser + 2nd participle means ‘action + state’) is correct, we can
expect that all the verbs that do not allow passivization with ser do not enter into a resultative tener
construction either. The explanation would then be that the non-passivizable transitive verbs are
atelic, i.e. they do not have a built-in endpoint, capable of becoming either the end-state of the
passive meaning ‘action + state’ or the end-result of the tener + 2nd participle’s meaning ‘action +
result’.
Bibliography
Beedham, C., 1982. The Passive Aspect in English, German and Russian. Tübingen: Narr.
Beedham, C., 2005. Language and Meaning: The structural creation of reality.
Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.
Bruyne, J. de, 1995. A Comprehensive Spanish Grammar. Oxford: Blackwell.
Mendikoetxea, A., 1999. “Construcciones con se: medias, pasivas e impersonales”. In I. Bosque & V.
Demonte, ed. Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española. Madrid: Real Academia Española.
Miguel, E. de, 1999. “El aspecto léxico”. In I. Bosque & V. Demonte, ed. Gramática descriptiva de la
lengua española. Madrid: Real Academia Española.
Vera-Morales, J., 2004. Spanische Grammatik. München/Wien: Oldenbourg.
Yllera, A., 1999. “Las perífrasis verbales de gerundio y participio”. In I. Bosque & V. Demonte, ed.
Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española. Madrid: Real Academia Española.