Logos

CONSTRUCTIONcon.spa.impersonal-refleja

impersonal refleja

A pattern in which a third person reflexive clitic stands before a verb frozen in the singular, so the clause states an event with no participant identified as acting.

The construction states an event whose agent is human, unspecified and deliberately unrecoverable, and it does so by freezing the verb rather than by removing a participant. The freezing is the whole point and it is why the record is marked irreducible: everywhere else a finite verb copies the number of the phrase it depends on, and here it does not, whatever stands beside it. Because the verb is frozen, the construction is available for verbs that supply no affected participant at all, including verbs of motion and the copulas, which is the sharpest boundary against the reflexive passive. A human complement takes the preposition a, and that marking does double duty: it satisfies the general rule for specific human objects and it blocks the reading on which the complement would have been the phrase the verb agrees with.

statusstatus
documentedasserted, and the sources agree
provenanceprovenance
authoredwritten for Logos, from first principles
derivation statusderivation_status
irreducibleit follows from nothing: an arbitrary fact of the language
saliencesalience
No salience. Where no frequency source applies the object carries none, rather than a default or a guess (03-schema.md §3.5).
aliasesaliases
  • metalanguagereflexive impersonal
sourcessources
  • SOURCENueva gramática de la lengua española (2009)src.nueva-gramaticano page in v1
  • SOURCEA New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish (Butt and Benjamin)src.butt-benjaminno page in v1

Why this is a construction at all

construction.admission

Goldberg's admission test: a template earns storage either by being unpredictable or by being frequent.

admissionadmission
unpredictableit is stored because its meaning does not follow from its parts

The slots

construction.slots

At least two, by the schema: fewer is not a multi-element template. Every filler is a link, never a name in prose.

  1. 0el clítico se, invariablelexically specified: only the fillers below may occupy it

    fillerslots[].filler
    functionslots[].fn
    No function is assigned to this slot.

  2. 1el verbo finito, fijo en tercera persona del singularlexically specified: only the fillers below may occupy it

    fillerslots[].filler
    functionslots[].fn
    FUNCTIONnúcleofun.spa.nucleo

  3. 2el complemento, que no altera la forma del verbopositional: this slot is a place in the string, not a lexical requirement

    fillerslots[].filler
    No filler is named. For a positional slot that is the correct reading; for a lexical one it is a gap.
    functionslots[].fn
    FUNCTIONcomplemento directofun.spa.complemento-directo

Slot template

3 slots: 2 constrained, 1 positional, 2 naming a grammatical function.

  1. el clítico se, invariable
    constrained
    • clítico reflexivoclass
  2. el verbo finito, fijo en tercera persona del singular
    constrained
    • verboclass

    names núcleo

  3. el complemento, que no altera la forma del verbo
    positional

    no lexical filler — this slot marks a position only

    names complemento directo

Confusable with

construction.confusable

Objects a reader is likely to mix up with this one, and the difference that separates them. The edge is symmetric and stored once, so this renders on both objects' pages from the one statement.

Everything joined to this object

One group per typed edge, in both directions. A1b guarantees no object node is an orphan, so this is the whole navigation: an object with no edges would have failed the build rather than reached this page.

What this object is a kind of

Walking this object's own `is-a` edges: what it is a kind of. Several branches from one object are several classification axes, not competing supertypes.

objects
1
places drawn
1
multi-parent
None in this view. This subgraph happens to be a tree, which the explorer draws as one without assuming it is one.

Siblings are listed by name, then by id to break ties. That is a display choice made here and not an order the graph asserts.

Fan-out per dimension

A4

One row per dimension, largest first. That is a display order, not a verdict: 03-schema.md declares no threshold above which fan-out is too much, so this reports the count and grades nothing.

  • case13 values
  • mood8 values
  • voice8 values
  • aspect7 values
  • aktionsart6 values
  • number6 values
  • person6 values
  • tense6 values
  • comparison4 values
  • evidentiality4 values
  • gender4 values
  • politeness4 values
  • valency4 values
  • animacy3 values
  • definiteness3 values
  • deixis3 values
  • finiteness2 values
  • information structure2 values
  • interrogativity2 values
  • polarity2 values
  • switch-reference2 values

What kinds of this object there are

Walking the `is-a` edges that point at this object: what kinds of it there are. An object reachable two ways is drawn in both places and is still one object.

objects
1
places drawn
1
multi-parent
None in this view. This subgraph happens to be a tree, which the explorer draws as one without assuming it is one.

Siblings are listed by name, then by id to break ties. That is a display choice made here and not an order the graph asserts.

has-a

edges.has-a

the parent carries this

this object carries

selects

edges.selects

the parent requires this elsewhere

this object requires, elsewhere

  • CLASSpreposicióncls.spa.preposiciondocumented
    • conditionA human complement is marked by the preposition a, which is also what keeps it from being read as the phrase the verb would agree with.

via

edges.via

this realizer, this way

this object realizes

overrides

edges.overrides

declared arbitrariness (A7)

this object overrides

  • OPERATIONconcordanciaopr.spa.concordanciadocumented
    • reasonThe finite verb stays third person singular however the phrase beside it is numbered, so the one dependency agreement would otherwise mark is left unmarked here.

derives

edges.derives

the why-chain

derived by