Agent-defocussing structures in Spanish, English and French : a contrastive corpus-based account of the interaction between different passive-like structures
(2021)
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- Authors
- Supervisors
- De Cock, Barbara
- Abstract
- Language has developed a wide range of syntactic devices to defocus the agent or, to put it differently, to provide the discourse with an impersonal, “faceless character” (Achard 2015: ix). The present thesis aims to shed new light on impersonal mechanisms by studying six constructions in English, French and Spanish: the periphrastic passive (available in the three languages), the English get-passive, the non-anaphoric third person plural (also used in the three languages), the se-construction (available in French and Spanish), the French man-impersonal on, and the numeral-based pronouns uno in Spanish and one in English. Through a corpus-based analysis, this contrastive work explored three axes: (i) the syntactico-pragmatic characteristics of the structures, (ii) the language specificities, and (iii) the impact of the register and the mode of production. The results allowed us to establish a detailed overview of the interaction of these structures, to create a prototype based on their specific features and to highlight the importance of taking into account external variables such as register and mode when studying syntactic phenomena.
- Affiliations
Citations
Pierre, E. (2021). Agent-defocussing structures in Spanish, English and French : a contrastive corpus-based account of the interaction between different passive-like structures. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/274276