Abstract
Using spoken and written corpora we investigate the use of impersonal passives in the Mainland Scandinavian languages. We establish that Danish and Norwegian use both the periphrastic bli(ve)-passive and the morphological s-passive, roughly to the same extent. In Swedish, on the other hand, impersonal bli-passive is very uncommon and seems to be used primarily when talking about the failure of an expected outcome. The findings are compared to the predictions made by Holmberg (2002) who proposes a set of parameters to account for agreement and word order in transitive impersonal passives. Holmberg's parameter settings make the correct predictions for Norwegian bokmål, where the word order participle preceding direct object (PCP DO) is clearly dominant. However, in Danish, which has the same parameter settings as bokmål, we also find the opposite order, DO PCP, especially with negated objects and in dialects. Norwegian nynorsk and Swedish, which also have the same parameter settings according to Holmberg, should allow both word orders. The corpus investigations show that Swedish practically only uses the DO PCP order whereas nynorsk prefers PCP DO, just like bokmål.
| Originalsprog | Svensk |
|---|---|
| Tidsskrift | Norsk Lingvistisk Tidsskrift |
| Vol/bind | 33 |
| Udgave nummer | 2 |
| Sider (fra-til) | 129-156 |
| Antal sider | 28 |
| ISSN | 0800-3076 |
| Status | Udgivet - 2015 |