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Part of
Reconnecting Form and Meaning: In honour of Kristin Davidse
Edited by Caroline Gentens, Lobke Ghesquière, William B. McGregor and An Van linden
[Studies in Language Companion Series 230] 2023
► pp. 45–69

Chapter 2
Impersonal passives in English and Norwegian

| University of Oslo
This chapter investigates passive constructions with an expletive subject, labelled as impersonal passives. The English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus (ENPC) provides material for comparison across both constructions and languages. The extracted dataset shows a higher frequency of impersonal passives in Norwegian, chiefly due to two patterns that English does not have, i.e. passives with intransitive verbs and transitive verbs which retain their postverbal complement in the passive. The study considers the communicative functions of the constructions, the process types of the passivized verbs, the expression of agency, and the thematic structure of clauses with impersonal passives, finding both differences and similarities. Translations between the languages are, however, most often non-congruent, even with extraposition and parentheticals, which exist in both languages.
Keywords: impersonal passive, expletive subject, extraposition, English/Norwegian
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous work
  • 3.Material, method and classification scheme
    • 3.1Corpus
    • 3.2Extraction method
    • 3.3Classification scheme
    • 3.4Comparison and tertium comparationis
  • 4.Contrastive analysis
    • 4.1Overall frequencies and patterns
    • 4.2Syntactic patterns
    • 4.3Process types in impersonal passives
    • 4.4Agency
    • 4.5Information structure
  • 5.Translation correspondences
  • 6.Concluding remarks
  • Notes
  • Corpus material
  • References
Published online: 10 February 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.230.02has
References (36)
Corpus material
The English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus (ENPC). <[URL]>
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