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Article published In: Languages in Contrast
Vol. 19:1 (2019) ► pp.2–26

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A corpus-based contrastive study of impersonal passives in Swedish and Dutch

ORCiD logo with link | Stockholm University
 | Artevelde University College Ghent
Published online: 9 May 2018
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/lic.16003.joh
Abstract
This paper deals with impersonal passives in two Germanic languages, Swedish and Dutch. Impersonal passives constitute one type of impersonal construction (denoting constructions with non-canonical subjects) as described in Siewierska ( 2008a. Introduction: impersonalization from a subject-centered vs. agent-centered perspective. Transactions of the Philological Society. Special issue Impersonal Constructions in Grammatical Theory, 106/2: 115–137. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar: 116). Formally, they consist of an overt expletive subject, such as det ‘it’ in Swedish and er ‘there’ in Dutch, combined with a passive predicate. Semantically, such passive constructions encode actions with a general reference, i.e. where no agent is specified (cf. Siewierska, A. 1984. The passive: a comparative linguistic analysis. London: Croom Helm.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, Engdahl, E. 2006. Semantic and syntactic patterns in Swedish passives. In Demoting the Agent. Passive, middle and other voice phenomena, T. Solstad and B. Lyngfelt (eds.), 21–45. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, Viberg, Å. 2010. Swedish Impersonal Constructions from a Cross-linguistic Perspective. An Exploratory Corpus-based Study. Orientalia Suecana LIX1 : 122–158.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). The study is corpus-based and uses a bidirectional translation corpus of Swedish and Dutch to map out the specific morphosyntactic and semantic profile of the impersonal passive in both Swedish and in Dutch. The similarities and differences make these languages suitable to study from a contrastive perspective in that interesting aspects on impersonal passives are highlighted in the translation data.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Remarks on Swedish and Dutch
  • 3.Corpus and method
  • 4.Analysis and results of the source data
    • 4.1Transitivity
    • 4.2Telicity
    • 4.3Controllability
    • 4.4Semantic fields
  • 5.Analysis and results of the translation data
    • 5.1The Swedish translations
    • 5.2The Dutch translations
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
References (33)
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Hasselgård, Hilde
2023. Impersonal passives in English and Norwegian. In Reconnecting Form and Meaning [Studies in Language Companion Series, 230], ► pp. 45 ff. DOI logo
Taylor, Charlotte & Dario del Fante*
2020. Comparing across languages in corpus and discourse analysis: some issues and approaches. Meta 65:1 ► pp. 29 ff. DOI logo

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