valency in Rioplatense Spanish

In Rioplatense Spanish the number of arguments a verb selects is mainly a property of the verb itself, and the language supplies a small set of grammatical means for changing it. The unstressed pronoun se removes an argument where the event is presented without a doer, as in la ventana se rompió, directs the action back onto the subject in se lavó, distributes it among the members of a plural subject in se saludaron, and supports a reading with no expressed subject at all in acá se trabaja mucho. A participant who brings the event about is added by a frame rather than by a suffix, with hacer or dejar plus an infinitive, as in lo hice salir, and no suffix for that operation exists. There is no operation promoting a participant from outside the core arguments in the strict sense, although a dative pronoun can attach a participant the verb does not select, as in le rompió el vaso. Marking appears only where the count departs from the verb's own frame, which is what the conditioned value records.