Analysis of impersonal constructions in Spanish and in French

This paper is a study devoted to the expression of impersonality in Spanish and French. The main objective is to detect differences between the two languages when expressing impersonality. Not all the possible linguistic resources for expressing impersonality in both languages have been treated but the following constructions have been dealt with: the periphrastic passive the reflexive passive impersonals with se and other phenomena relevant to the topic. In French only the voix passive the pronominal impersonnel and the pronoun on have been analyzed. After the presentation of all the constructions a comparison between the two languages has been made. The practical part consists of the analysis of a corpus of 120 collected abstracts 61 of which are in French and 59 in Spanish. The analysis has been carried out on the basis of different guidelines but the main objective will be to verify the hypotheses put forward in the comparative part.