Resumen de Los valores de "se": nuevos datos de una visión comparativa de las lenguas medievales
The present article investigates —on the basis of corpus studies— the status of passive, anticausative and impersonal se constructions in Medieval Spanish and Medieval French. It shows that the two languages choose different ways of integrating the syntactic functions made available by the grammaticalization of se. While we find an abundant use of the constructions in Medieval Spanish texts (literary and scientific prose texts) and especially so in verbal actions that contain low-Agentivity subjects, Medieval French does not use them very frequently and in the case of impersonal se, a full reanalysis must be questioned.
Furthermore, Medieval French has a strong tendency to opt for configurations in which high-Agentivity subjects can be maintained, which seems to be linked to the emergence of SVO as a basic word pattern in the course of the XIIth and XIIIth centuries and the abundant and steady use of the indefinite pronoun on from the earliest stages onwards.
