Grammar Talk: Impersonal Constructions

SECAP Ambato decided not to put out advertising for this semester's classes. The result was that I had three students in my class on Tuesday and we have postponed classes for a week to promote the coming semester in the local newspaper and get some more students.

The result of this one-week extension of my break is that I have been hitting the Spanish grammar books again to put an end to my doubts about impersonal constructions and move forward on my quest to becoming a Spanish genius.

Is it like English?

My first instinct when trying to put together impersonal statements was to use the same constructions we use in English and translate them directly.

In English, one common way to create impersonal sentences is to use the second-person singular pronoun you, as in You have to cook oatmeal before you eat it. While this utterance uses an ostensibly specific pronoun, it is really making an impersonal statement and the advice that oatmeal should be cooked before it is eaten applies to everyone, not just the person being directly spoken to.

I can't recall ever hearing this use of the second-person singular tú in Spanish to convey an impersonal meaning as it would in English, but B&B states that it is used informally in Spain, even in situations in which the speakers are using usted with one another, Es increíble, si lo piensas (It's incredible if you think of it). In Ecuador, I never use or hear this construction, so I would not recommend its use in this country.

Another common impersonal construction we employ in English is using the third-person plural pronoun they to refer to no one in particular when the subject is either obvious or unimportant.  

They say that talking on cell phones gives you cancer. Who is they? The speaker didn't bother mentioning the names of all the institutions that came to this conclusion because he either doesn't know their names or he is talking to someone who wouldn't care even if he did know them.

Also, They arrested Tim's uncle yesterday. Since an impersonal construction is used here, we can assume that the captor of Tim's uncle was the police since that is the most likely possibility. If Dog the Bounty Hunter and his wife had done the arresting, the impersonal they would probably not have been utilized because they are not the most likely subject and they deserve specific mentioning.

In Spanish, the use of the third-person plural forms to signify impersonal constructions works exactly as it does in English, Hablan feo en la costa. The speaker is not referring to the speech of particular individuals, but to people from the coast in general.

I encounter this construction frequently in Ecuador and use it a lot myself since it is so similar to how I would speak in English. This is perhaps the easiest way to make correct impersonal statements for native English speakers.

How One Uses the Impersonal

A less common form of the impersonal in English is to use the word one to mean a person in general, One should never take calls at the dinner table. In English, this sounds a bit stuffier than using you or they to make impersonal sentences, but the Spanish word uno/una functions the same way, Uno tiene que aprobar para pasar al próximo nivel.

As I'll talk about later on, the use of uno to denote an impersonal subject comes in handy when pronominal verbs make using the impersonal se impossible.

Spanish Only Constructions

There are two more ways to express impersonal subjects in Spanish that we do not have equivalents for in English (both of which are quite confusing).

The first is the one that I was familiar with before I came to Ecuador: the impersonal se. In this construction, the pronoun se is added before a verb conjugated only in the third-person singular, Se come mucho pescado en la costa (They eat a lot of fish on the coast).

The impersonal se can lead to some ambiguities when the subject is singular (since the impersonal se is never plural, Se venden manzanas en el mercado can only be passive), but I rarely find that they interfere with the essential message of an utterance because context clues are usually available to clear things up.

For instance, B&B gives the example sentence En España se come mucho. In a discussion about a particular type of food, garlic for instance, the se in this sentence would be interpreted as the passive se and it would read A lot of garlic is eaten in Spain.

If the discussion was about the quantity of food eaten in general, it would be interpreted as the impersonal se and would read People in Spain eat a lot. Like I mentioned before, the main point usually comes across depending on the context and the impersonal and passive se rarely get me mixed up.

The impersonal se is very common in my experience and it is definitely worth mastering.

*It should be noted that in sentences with pronominal verbs, the impersonal se cannot always be used. For instance, the pronoun is essential to the meaning of the verb cansarse. In this sentence from B&B, Con estas cosas se cansa mucho, the subject is someone specific and the meaning is that He/She gets very tired with these things. If someone wanted to make this sentence impersonal it would be impossible to have two ses next to each other. Instead, the pronoun uno/una must be used to make it Con estas cosas se cansa uno mucho (One gets very tired with these things).

The last variety of impersonal constructions is the one that has eluded me until I arrived in Ecuador and started paying close attention when listening to people speak and reading the newspaper. It is the impersonal se with the personal a.

When the subject of a sentence is a living thing that is capable of doing things to itself, the passive se can lead to difficult ambiguities. The example provided in B&B is, Se mataron dos ingleses. This can be interpreted as a passive, reciprocal, or reflexive se to mean that Two Englishmen were killed, Two Englishmen killed each other, or Two Englishmen killed one another.

A common attempt from an English speaker to rectify this ambiguity would be to invoke the passive using ser (Dos ingleses fueron matados). B&B notes that this style is typical of written language but rare in spontaneous speech.

To avoid this ambiguity in spontaneous speech, therefore, an impersonal construction can be used to imply an unidentified human agent as the subject to eliminate the reciprocal and reflexive interpretations. With this construction the sentence would read, Se mató a dos ingleses. The only interpretation here is that two Englishmen were killed. The information conveyed is the same as the construction with the passive se (two Englishmen were killed by an unnamed subject) but without the possibility of confusing it with other constructions.

Other examples from B&B include:

• Se persiguió y encarceló a millares de creyentes. (Thousands of believers were persecuted and jailed)

• Se incitaba a las muchachas a trabajar más que los muchachos. (The girls were encouraged to work harder than the boys.)

•  ...hasta que se les pueda evacuar (...until they can be evacuated)

B&B notes that many speakers prefer to use le/les instead of lo/la/los/las with this construction even when the pronouns are the direct object of the verb, which explains the pronoun choice in the last example (leísmo anyone?).

Conclusion

Expressing impersonal with:

• Second-person singular: not particularly common where I am; I don't recommend it.
• Third-person plural: easy for English speakers and common in Spanish; do it.
• Uno/Una: more familiar for English speakers than the impersonal se, and necessary with pronominal verbs.
• Impersonal se: tricky for English speakers, but learn it.
• Impersonal se + personal a: technically an impersonal construction, but used to express otherwise exceedingly ambiguous passive constructions; worth at least being familiar with.