'Pasa que ya no vivo allí'. On the use of 'pasar' as third-person verb in current Spanish Abstract. I

Abstract

In the present note the condition of the verb pasar (‘to pass’) is reviewed when it behaves as a third-person verb. To do this, firstly, the grammatical situation of the third-person verbs in current Spanish is briefly summarized (suceder, ocurrir, acontecer, resultar and es que), to later describe – through abundant documentation from various sources – the construction pasa que, in relation to its position in the sentence, the verbal regime that presents, the tenses with which it usually appears and its combination with adverbs, conjunctions, adverbial phrases and sentence links. This usage of pasa que as a third person verb seems to have a higher frequency in the variety of Argentina, compared to other varieties, according to the data in the Corpus del español: Web/ Dialects.