Eckhard Bick - VISL

Portuguese pronoun equivalent to French 'on', Danish 'man' etc., which exhibit the same
features: +HUM and third person singular (for a number discussion, cp. 5e and 5f). 207
One might ask, why the impersonal pronoun analysis can't be applied to the
"passive" constructions in (3) as well. While this might appear a tempting simplification
when looking at singular 2-argument sentences like vende-se um carro ('a car is for
sale'), two tests prove that this is not a viable alternative in the specific cases: First,
making se the subject and carro the direct object - as one would in an impersonal
analysis -, does not work in the plural (vendem-se carros and 3b-c), as the number
agreement relation of the verb shows - it clearly prefers carros as subject 208 . Second,
since the object complement deputado in (3a and 3a') obligatorily needs a direct object,
se cannot be subject, because it is the only object candidate in
(3a') pode eleger-se deputado
The fact that Collor can be omitted in (3a') is by itself evidence for that it is subject and
not object, since Portuguese subjects are optional, but objects in the presence of object
complements are not.
In general, surface-existing pre-positioned subject candidates (@SUBJ>) tend to
prohibit the impersonal @SUBJ reading for "se" (French 'on', Danish 'man'), since this
would make the first NP a pre-positioned direct object (@ACC>) and imply either OSV
word order (with pre-positioned "se") or (with enclitic "se") OVS word order, both of
which are very rare in noun-caseless 209 Portuguese, and thus unlikely even without a
number agreement problem:
(5a) o delta @SUBJ> se @ACC-PASS> divide em ..
('the delta is divided into ...')
(5b) nada @SUBJ> se @ACC-PASS> compare a ...
('nothing can be compared to ...')
(5c) o fim @SUBJ> da ditadura celebrou-se @