Impersonal or passive differences
Every so often, I see questions asking about the differences between the impersonal and the passive voice, and I always wonder...why does it matter? I think I might be missing something because I don't understand why the labeling is so important. In a thread called "Impersonal and Passive", even Lazarus says:
I am more and more convinced every day that certain aspects of a language should be learnt by understanding the effect and the meaning, without paying too much attention to the grammatical jargon. Even I have to think for a few seconds sometimes before giving the right syntactic analysis. If I had to perform such a slow analysis, even if it only took one second, it would be far too slow to maintain a proper conversation.
I understand the different constructions and I understand how to avoid possible ambiguities What I don't understand is...does it matter? Is there a reason to know what it is called, if you know what it means? Aren't they just two ways to express almost the same thing, in slightly different ways?
It must be important, people keep talking about it.
3 Answers
That is a very mute point you raise here Lucie. I understand very little about English grammar, yet it is my native tongue. As I've said before, before I started learning Spanish I honestly didn't know what a verb, noun adjective was! I'm not joking here lol.
However, when you are learning a new language, one of the problems is, you obviously don't know what is important to know and what is not. Therefore you go through the pain of learning all the different grammatical constructs, then rationalise them all in your head and in time, hopefully!!!, you just understand it without thinking too deeply about it.
The more I read the more I am convinced that it is not gravely important to know the difference between impersonal and passive 'se'. However, by delving that deep you start to really be aware of the lower level subtleties that we perhaps take for granted in our native tongue, because, well we just understand it.
For example, reading the article you mentioned really brought home to me how imperative the personal 'a' is. Without this, the direct object (ie person) could easily be mistaken as the subject of the sentence. Then you start getting into the murky waters of, is it a reciprocal or passive construct etc.
Hi Lucie,
I thought about that myself a while ago, and this was my conclusion. Hopefully, it is a grammatically correct explanation.
I think that the impersonal and passive construction are actually grammatically distinct.
The passive voice always has an agent. When you say, "Se entra aquí", it can't be the passive voice because there is no agent. It is just, "One enters here."
La casa se vende por Juan. In this case, this is the passive voice, because there is an agent - Juan. It is the obverse of the active construction, Juan vende la casa.
So, does it matter what you call it? I suppose not, unless you want to understand the grammatical underpinnings of the construction. To do that, it does matter what you call it, because the grammatical constructions are distinct.
It is important to grammarians.
I agree with lazarus.
