The Spanish impersonal se-construction

According to the new edition of the Spanish Academy Grammar (Bosque 2009: 1220ff,2665), it remains unexplained why the clitic object in the Spanish impersonal transitive se-construction tends to be in dative (le): se le ve ‘you can see him’. The aim of this paper is to analyze this usage quantitatively, with focus on its constructional motivation. To achieve solid empirical evidence, I extracted large amounts of data from Corpus del Español (20.4 mill. words) and analyzed the data statistically. I found that the constructional motivation for the dative is substantial and that it is due to characteristics of the specific impersonal se-construction.