Raised passives, double passives and lexical passive auxiliaries

doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.31810/RSEL.49.4

Abstract

In a chain of auxiliary verbs, the canonical realization of diathesis in the verbal domain, in Spanish, is immediately to the left of the lexical verb (El palacio empezó a ser construido en el s. xiii, lit. «The palace started to be built in the 13th century»). However, there are two constructions that seem to be alternatives to this canonical expression, to which we will refer as «double passive» (El palacio fue empezado a ser construido en el s. XIII, lit. «The palace was started to be built in the 13th century») and «raised passive» (El palacio fue empezado a construir en el s. XIII, lit. «The palace was started to build in the 13th century»). We will analyse both alternatives from a syntactic-semantic point of view, focusing on empirically adequate structural descriptions for these constructions, and contrasting our approach with previous analyses.

Keywords: aspectual auxiliaries; functional auxiliaries; passive raising; double passive; grammaticalization.