The effect of literacy, text type, and modality on the use of grammatical means for agency alternation in Spanish

The paper explores developmental patterns in a set of grammatical constructions that Spanish speaker-writers can use for agency alternation. Although all these constructions downgrade agency, they differ in the way they do so, and in the formal devices they use for this purpose. Some promote a patient perspective (ser-marked passives and se-passives), others promote a generic interpretation of agents (se-impersonals and 2nd person singular), while still others impute a degree of autonomy to the situation denoted by the predicate (se-middles). All these constructions appear more frequently in expository texts than in narrative texts and, except for 2nd person singular pronouns, more appear in the written modality than in the spoken modality. However, only passives showed a clear developmental pattern. The study shows that, given the options of a particular language, the distribution of grammatical constructions is an outcome of communicative purposes - that is, a function of the type of text as perceived by the speaker-writer - in relation to thematic content and perceptions of written language as a discourse style.