Passive Imperatives in Spanish

Cristina Sánchez López

doi:10.5565/rev/catjl.493

Passive Imperatives in Spanish

Authors

Cristina Sánchez López Universidad Complutense de Madrid https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9936-0617

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Abstract

In this paper I propose that Spanish passive imperatives with the passive reflexive pronoun SE have all the semantic and formal properties of imperative sentences in spite of the fact that their subject cannot be coreferent with the addressee, since it is generally a non-human object which is interpreted as a patient. I propose that the special and intriguing properties of passive imperatives come from the fact that they perform a deferred directive speech act. An analysis in terms of Speech Act Phrase is provided. The passive imperative sentence merges as an open expression, since the Addressee argument does not receive a referential index, but it is a free variable whose value will be fixed later on. Passive morphology allows a formal subject to merge whose reference is not bound to the addressee. The analysis provides an explanation to the fact that passive imperatives typically occur in written texts, advices, and instructions, i.e., the type of texts that allow differed speech acts.

Keywords

passive voice, imperative, deferred speech-act, optative, Spanish

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Passive Imperatives in Spanish

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