voice in Rioplatense Spanish

Rioplatense Spanish treats the ordinary assignment of participants to grammatical positions as the unmarked case and marks a departure from it. The multi word alternative that promotes a different participant to subject, ser plus a participle agreeing with that subject, as in fue construida, exists and is largely confined to formal written registers. The ordinary spoken equivalent uses the unstressed pronoun se, as in se construyeron tres casas, where the verb agrees with the promoted participant and the most active participant cannot be expressed at all. The same pronoun carries the readings in which the action returns to the subject and in which the members of a plural subject act on one another, so one form covers several of the values the dimension lists and the reading is settled by the verb and the context rather than by the form. The language has no operation demoting the object of a two participant verb, since it has no alignment for one to operate on. Marking appears only where the assignment departs from the ordinary one, which is what the conditioned value records.