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

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

ORCID logo | Stockholm University
| Artevelde University College Ghent

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: 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 1984, Engdahl 2006, Viberg 2010). 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.

Keywords: impersonal passive, corpus-based, translation, Swedish/Dutch
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
Published online: 9 May 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lic.16003.joh
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