Sur le passif en "se" en portugais

Abstract

Anyone who observes sentences in Portuguese as a) Fala-se Inglês and b) Fala-se de importantes mudanças sociais, would think that the same construction is involved. In this paper, we’ll show that, instead, one must analyze these sentences as two different se constructions: a pronominal passive in a) and a non-personal construction in b). We’ll present their syntactic and semantic features as also a "classic" passive and an infinitive passive synopsis that allows us to point out the pronominal passive’s singularity.