ABSTRACT
In addition to the standard passive construction, Spanish and Italian have a third-person plural arbitrary subject construction, in which the subject is understood as nonspecific and not necessarily plural. These two sentence types are thematically very similar, and I argue here that they have essentially the same syntactic structures and that the obvious differences between them can be explained in a natural manner. This analysis allows us to maintain a very strong notion of linking between θ-roles and syntactic positions, as in Baker’s Universal Theta Alignment Hypothesis (UTAH). The analysis explains the two major differences between the two sentence types: the differences in morphology and the fact that the passive construction allows for a by-phrase, while the third-person plural arbitrary subject construction does not. The analysis can also be extended to account for indefinite se in Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian.
