Abstract

This research seeks to characterize the types of diatheses of se constructions + agent complement headed by the locution por parte de in standard written Spanish. It is an exploratory study that adopts the syntactically oriented approach of Kulikov (2011) to describe the different types of passives that compose subject-demoting diatheses in Spanish. The data, drawn from 500 examples of the CREA and CORPES corpora, were analyzed using a descriptive-grammatical qualitative methodology. The results show that, although non paradigmatic se constructions have been considered semantically impersonal, they often present an express agent whose referent can actually be a particular individual.