The concept of verbal impersonality in the Spanish grammar tradition: from the origins to Correas (c. 1350-1627)

• Published in: RILCE. Revista de Filologia Hispanica Vol. 28; no. 2; pp. 385 - 405
• Main Author: Calvo Fernandez, Vicente
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: Spanish
• Published: 01.07.2012
• ISSN: 0213-2370

The aim of this paper is to provide a descriptive panorama of the different approaches to verbal impersonality in the Spanish grammatical tradition, from very primitive testimonials of the Latin-Romance scholastic grammar to the end of the Spanish "Siglo de Oro". Once the specific phenomena of verbal impersonality are collected and interpreted, results about the linguistic conception underlying the analyzed grammars will be generated. It is particularly interesting to know how an adequate terminology was being coined for each case, with greater or lesser acumen, and how the distinction of the semantic and morphosyntactic maps of language was studied in-depth. At the same time, the difficulties of some grammarians to establish a Latin independent grammatical model are confirmed. Adapted from the source document