Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-cfpbc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-16T06:15:12.566Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Prepositional passives in Danish, Norwegian and Swedish: A corpus study

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 November 2015

Elisabet Engdahl  and
Anu Laanemets
Elisabet Engdahl
Affiliation:
Department of Swedish, University of Gothenburg, Box 200, S-450 30 Gothenburg, Sweden. elisabet.engdahl@svenska.gu.se
Anu Laanemets
Affiliation:
The LANCHART Centre, University of Copenhagen, Njalsgade 136, 2300 København S, Denmark. Laanemets@hum.ku.dk
Get access

Abstract

There are conflicting reports in the literature concerning whether the Scandinavian languages use prepositional passives as in English. Maling & Zaenen (1985) showed that Icelandic does not have the construction; instead the Icelandic data should be analyzed as topicalization of the complement of a preposition in impersonal passives. They suggested that the same account would be appropriate for Danish and Swedish, whereas Norwegian is reported to have a rather productive prepositional passive (Lødrup 1991). In order to find out to what extent and in what ways prepositional passives are actually used, we carried out a series of investigations in Danish, Norwegian and Swedish contemporary text corpora, analyzing over 3600 potential prepositional passives, with a balance of periphrastic and morphological passive forms. We have found that prepositional passives are indeed used in all three languages, but rather infrequently, ranging from 3.4 per million words (3.4/mw) in Swedish, 5/mw in Danish to 16/mw in Norwegian. The majority of the prepositional passives are periphrastic bli(ve)-passives. The passive subject is typically animate, a person or an animal, who is psychologically affected by the action, or the lack of action, expressed by the participle. The notion of affectedness that is relevant for these languages thus differs from what has been described for English. Prepositional s-passives are found in coordinated structures and in infinitival complements of modal verbs, a context known to favour s-passive.

Keywords

affectednessanimacyDanishIcelandicimpersonal passiveNorwegianprepositional passivepseudo-passiveScandinavianSwedish
Type
Research Article
Information
Nordic Journal of Linguistics , Volume 38 , Issue 3 , December 2015 , pp. 285 - 337
Copyright
Copyright © Nordic Association of Linguistics 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Aa, Leiv Inge. 2015. The Grammar of Verb–Particle Constructions in Spoken Norwegian. Ph.D. thesis, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim.Google Scholar
Åfarli, Tor A. 1989. Passive in Norwegian and in English. Linguistic Inquiry 20, 101–108.Google Scholar
Alsina, Alex. 2009. The prepositional passive as structure-sharing. In Butt, Miriam & King, Tracy Holloway (eds.), Proceedings of the LFG09 Conference, 44–64. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. http://csli-publications.stanford.edu (accessed May 2014)Google Scholar
Anderson, Stephen R. 1977. Comments on the paper by Wasow. In Culicover et al. (eds.), 361–377.Google Scholar
Becker-Christensen, Christian. 2012. Dansk syntaks. Indføring i dansk sætningsgrammatik og sætningsanalyse [Danish syntax: Introduction to Danish clause structure and analysis]. Frederiksberg: Samfundslitteratur.Google Scholar
Bolinger, Dwight. 1975. On the passive in English. In Makkai, Adam & Valerie Becker Makkai (eds.), The First LACUS Forum 1974, 57–80. Columbia, SC: Hornbeam Press.Google Scholar
Bolinger, Dwight. 1977. Transitivity and spatiality: The passive of prepositional verbs. In Makkai, Adam, Makkai, Valerie Becker & Heilmann, Luigi (eds.), Linguistics at the Crossroads, 57–78. Lake Bluff, IL: Jupiter Press.Google Scholar
Bresnan, Joan. 1982. The passive in lexical theory. In Bresnan, Joan (ed.), The Mental Representations of Grammatical Relations, 3–86. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Carnie, Andrew & Harley, Heidi. 2005. Existential impersonals. Studia Linguistica 59, 46–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Christensen, Kirsti Koch. 1986. Complex passives, reanalysis and word formation. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 9, 135–162.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth. 1979. The Prepositional Passive in English: A Semantic-Syntactic Analysis, with a Lexicon of Prepositional Verbs (Linguistische Arbeiten 81). Tübingen: Niemeyer Verlag.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Culicover, Peter W., Wasow, Thomas & Akmajian, Adrian (eds). 1977. Formal Syntax. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Dahl, Östen. 2000. Egophoricity in discourse and syntax. Functions of Language 7 (1), 37–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dahl, Östen. 2008. Animacy and egophoricity: Grammar, ontology and phylogeny. Lingua 118, 141–150.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davison, Alice. 1980. Peculiar passives. Language 56, 42–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
De Cuypere, Ludovic, Baten, Kristof & Rawoens, Gudrun. 2014. A corpus-based analysis of the Swedish passive alternation. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 37, 199–223.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Diderichsen, Paul. 1962. Elementær Dansk Grammatik [Elementary Danish grammar], 3rd edn. København: Gyldendal.Google Scholar
Emonds, Joseph. 1972. Evidence that Indirect Object Movement is a structure presserving rule. Foundtations of Language 8, 546–561.Google Scholar
Engdahl, Elisabet. 1999. The choice between bli-passive and s-passiv in Danish, Norwegian and Swedish (Nordsem Report 3). http://www.svenska.gu.se/digitalAssets/1336/1336829_engdahl-nordsem-passivechoice-1999.pdf.Google Scholar
Engdahl, Elisabet. 2006. Semantic and syntactic patterns in Swedish passives. In Lyngfelt & Solstad (eds.), 21–45.Google Scholar
Engdahl, Elisabet. 2012. Optional expletive subjects in Swedish. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 35, 99–144.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Engdahl, Elisabet & Laanemets, Anu. 2015. Opersonlig passiv i danska, norska och svenska – en korpusstudie [Impersonal passive in Danish, Norwegian and Swedish: A corpus study]. Ms., University of Gothenburg & University of Copenhagen.Google Scholar
Faarlund, Jan Terje, Lie, Svein & Vannebo, Kjell Ivar. 1997. Norsk referansegrammatikk [Norwegian reference grammar]. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.Google Scholar
GDS = see Hansen & Heltoft (2011).Google Scholar
Goh, Gwang-Yoon. 2001. The advent of the prepositional passive: An innovation of Middle English? English Studies 82 (3), 203–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hansen, Aage. 1967. Moderne Dansk [Modern Danish], vol. III. København: Grafisk forlag.Google Scholar
Hansen, Erik & Heltoft, Lars. 2011. Grammatik over det Danske Sprog [Grammar of the Danish language]. København: Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab.Google Scholar
Heltoft, Lars. 2006. Grammaticalisation as content reanalysis: The modal character of the Danish s-passive. In Thomsen, Ole Nedergaard (ed.), Competing Models of Linguistic Change: Evolution and Beyond, 269–288. Amsterdam & Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heltoft, Lars & Jakobsen, Lisbeth Falster. 1996. Danish passives and subject positions as a mood system: A content analysis. In Engberg-Pedersen, Elisabeth, Fortescue, Michael, Harder, Peter, Heltoft, Lars & Jakobsen, Lisbeth Falster (eds.), Content, Expression and Structure: Studies in Danish Functional Grammar, 199–234. Amsterdam & Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Herslund, Michael. 1984. Particles, prefixes and preposition stranding. NyS 14: Topics in Danish Syntax, 34–71.Google Scholar
Hestvik, Arild. 1986. Case theory and Norwegian impersonal constructions: Subject–object alternations in active and passive verbs. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 9, 181–197.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holmberg, Anders. 1986. Word Order and Syntactic Features in the Scandinavian Languages and English. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Linguistics, University of Stockholm.Google Scholar
Hornstein, Norbert & Weinberg, Amy. 1981. Case Theory and preposition stranding. Linguistic Inquiry 12, 55–91.Google Scholar
Hovdhaugen, Even. 1977. Om og omkring passiv i norsk [About and around passive in Norwegian]. In Fretheim, Thorstein (ed.), Sentrale problemer i norsk syntaks [Central problems in Norwegian syntax], 15–46. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.Google Scholar
Hulthén, Lage. 1944. Studier i jämförande nunordisk syntax [Studies in comparative contemporary Nordic syntax] (Göteborgs högskolas årsskrift L). Göteborg: Wettergern & Kerber.Google Scholar
Jespersen, Otto. 1909–49. A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles, 7 vols. Heidelberg: Carl Winters Universitätsbuchhandlung.Google Scholar
Körner, Rudolv. 1948. Studier över syntaktisk nybildning i svenskan. I. De prepositionella passivbildningarna med hänsyn tagen tagen till motsvarande nybildningar i danskan, norskan och engelskan [Studies in syntactic innovations in Swedish: Prepositional passive constructions taking account of corresponding innovations in Danish, Norwegian and English] (Stockholm Studies in Scandinavian Philology 6). Lund: Gleerups.Google Scholar
Körner, Rudolv. 1949. The prepositional passive formations: A contribution to West European syntax. Moderna språk 43, 53–67.Google Scholar
Laanemets, Anu. 2012. Passiv i moderne dansk, norsk og svensk. Et korpusbaseret studie af tale- og skriftsprog [Passive in modern Danish, Norwegian and Swedish: A corpus-based study of spoken and written language]. Ph.D. dissertation, Tartu University. http://dspace.utlib.ee/dspace/bitstream/handle/10062/27711/laanemets_anu.pdf.Google Scholar
Laanemets, Anu. 2013. The passive voice in spoken and written Danish, Norwegian and Swedish: A comparative corpus-based study. Languages in Contrast 13 (1), 67–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Laanemets, Anu & Engdahl, Elisabet. 2015. Findes der præpositionspassiv i dansk? [Are there any prepositional passives in Danish?]. In Inger Schoonderbeck Hansen & Tina Thode Hougaard (eds.), 15. Møde om Udforskningen af Dansk Sprog, Århus 2014 [15th Meeting on Research on the Danish Language], 87–104.Google Scholar
Larsson, Ida. 2014. Expletives and agreement in passives. Nordic Atlas of Language Structures (NALS) Journal 1, 360–369.Google Scholar
Law, Paul. 2006. Preposition stranding. In Everaert, Martin & van Riemsdijk, Henk (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Syntax, vol. III, 631–684. Malden, MA: Blackwell.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lindstad, Arne Martinus, Nøklestad, Anders, Johannessen, Janne Bondi & Vangsnes, Øystein Alexander. 2009. The Nordic Dialect Database: Mapping microsyntactic variation in the Scandinavian languages. In Kristiina Jokinen & Eckhard Bick (eds.), Proceedings of the 17th Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics NODALIDA 2009 (NEALT Proceedings Series, vol. 4). http://hdl.handle.net/10062/9810.Google Scholar
Lødrup, Helge. 1985. Om reanalyse [About reanalysis]. Skriftserie 21, 97–110. [Department of Linguistics and Phonetics, University of Bergen]Google Scholar
Lødrup, Helge. 1991. The Norwegian pseudopassive in lexical theory. Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax 47, 118–129.Google Scholar
Lundquist, Björn. 2014a. Verb–particles: Active verbs. Nordic Atlas of Language Structures (NALS) Journal 1, 110–118.Google Scholar
Lundquist, Björn. 2014b. Verb–particles: Particle placement in passives. Nordic Atlas of Language Structures (NALS) Journal 1, 119–126.Google Scholar
Lundquist, Björn. The role of tense-copying and syncretism in the licensing of morphological passives in the Nordic languages. Studia Linguistica 69 (3), doi:10.1111/stul.12036. Published online by Wiley, 19 July 2015.Google Scholar
Lyngfelt, Benjamin & Solstad, Torgrim (eds.). 2006. Demoting the Agent: Passive, Middle and Other Voice Phenomena. Amsterdam & Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maling, Joan. 2006. From passive to active: Syntactic change in progress in Icelandic. In Lyngfelt & Solstad (eds.), 197–223.Google Scholar
Maling, Joan & Zaenen, Annie. 1985. Preposition-stranding and passive. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 8, 197–209.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mikkelsen, Kristian. 1911/1975. Dansk Ordföjningslære [Danish syntax]. København: Hans Reitzels forlag.Google Scholar
NRG = see Faarlund, Lie & Vannebo (1997).Google Scholar
Pedersen, Karen Margrethe. 2011. Relativt som i grammatisk, historisk og geografisk belysning [Relative som from grammatical, historical and geographical perspectives]. In Inger Schoonderbeck Hansen & Peter Widell (eds.), 13. Møde om Udforskningen af Dansk Sprog, Århus 2010 [13th Meeting on Research on the Danish Language], 225–235.Google Scholar
Retskrivningsordbogen [Dictionary of Danish standard orthography]. 1986. København: Dansk Sprognævn.Google Scholar
SAG = see Teleman, Hellberg & Andersson (1999).Google Scholar
Sandøy, Helge. 1976. Laust samansette verb i vestnordisk: Ein samanliknande leddstillingsanalyse for islandssk, færøysk og romsdalsmål [Compound verbs with separable particles in west Nordic]. Oslo: Universitetet i Oslo.Google Scholar
Sandøy, Helge. 1985. Norsk dialektkunnskap [Norwegian dialectology]. Oslo: Novus.Google Scholar
Sköldberg, Emma. 2004. Korten på bordet. Innehålls- och uttrycksmässig variation hos svenska idiom [Cards on the table: Variations in content and expression in Swedish idioms] (Meijerbergs Arkiv 31). Göteborg: Göteborgs universitet.Google Scholar
Søfteland, Åshild. 2014. Utbrytingskonstruksjonen i norsk spontantale [The cleft construction in spoken Norwegian]. Ph.D. dissertation, Universitetet i Oslo.Google Scholar
Sundman, Marketta. 1987. Subjektsval och diates i svenskan [Subject choice and diathesis in Swedish]. Åbo: Åbo Akademis förlag.Google Scholar
Svenonius, Peter. 1996. The verb–particle alternation in the Scandinavian languages. http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz (accessed May 2014)Google Scholar
Svenonius, Peter. 2003. Swedish particles and directional prepositions. In Lars-Olof Delsing, Cecilia Falk, Gunlög Josefsson & Halldór À. Sigurðsson (eds.), Grammar in Focus: Festschrift for Christer Platzack 18 November 2003, vol. II, 343–351. Lund: Department of Scandinavian Languages, Lund University.Google Scholar
Taraldsen, K. Tarald. 1983. Parametric Variation in Phrase Structure. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Tromsø.Google Scholar
Teleman, Ulf, Hellberg, Staffan & Andersson, Erik. 1999. Svenska Akademiens grammatik [The Swedish Academy grammar], 4 vols. Stockholm: Norstedts.Google Scholar
Thráinsson, Höskuldur. 2007. The Syntax of Icelandic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Toivonen, Ida. 2003. Non-projecting Words: A Case Study of Swedish Verbal Particles. Dordrecht: Kluwer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tungseth, Mai. 2008. Verbal Prepositions and Argument Structure: Path, Place and Possession in Norwegian. Amsterdam & Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
van Riemsdijk, Henk. 1978. A Case Study in Syntactic Markedness: The Binding Nature of Prepositional Phrases. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar
Vikner, Sten. 1991. Relative der and Other C0-elements in Danish. Lingua 84 (2–3), 109–136.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vikner, Sten. 1995. Verb Movement and Expletive Subjects in the Germanic Languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ward, Gregory, Birner, Betty & Huddleston, Rodney. 2002. Information packaging. In Huddleston, Rodney & Pullum, Geoffrey K.et al., The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, 1363–1447. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wasow, Thomas. 1977. Transformations and the lexicon. In Culicover et al. (eds.), 327–360.Google Scholar
Zaenen, Annie, Maling, Joan & Thráinsson, Höskuldur. 1985. Case and grammatical functions: The Icelandic passive. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 3, 441–483.CrossRefGoogle Scholar