Passive Voice in Spanish in News Online: Reflexive Passive with Se-construction and Periphrastic Passive with Ser

Abstract

          This paper tries to complete two objectives: 1) to discover the number of passive voice sentences being used in online news and 2) to analyze functions such as the syntactic and semantic constructions of the passive voice in relation to the two passive voices in Spanish. The two passive voices that will be taken into account are the se-construction passive or reflexive passive and the ser-construction passive or periphrastic passive. fifty online news pieces from five different types of news sources were explored in order to find the total number of passive sentences being used. Findings revealed that 149 passive sentences were found and 2.98 passive sentences were applied in one particular news piece. The author of the grammar lecture also introduced ideas based on grammatical rules towards passive voices in Spanish. The review explains that 1) Reflexive passive functions are universal tools to convey general value by focusing on processes and not the agentive phrase. Its feature is in the Se + Verb 3^rd subject in singular or plural. The syntactic construction is the active voice but semantically conveys the meaning of passive voice due to the same active and passive subject. It is used more frequently than the periphrastic passive, especially in everyday life conversations or spoken languages. 2) Periphrastic passive has a strong syntactic construction because of the agreement between elements in a sentence. Its construction is the Ser + past participle (+ por + agentive phrase). It is an individual function which can be followed by the preposition por as deemed necessary in context where action verbs can frequently be found. Periphrastic passive is applied particularly more towards formal languages such as historical narration, medical and scientific fields and journalistic styles. In addition to this, the guideline for teaching Spanish passive voice to Thai learners was proposed at the end of the paper.