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Passive in Danish, English, and German

Author: Stefan Müller and Bjarne Ørsnes

Keywords: Passive, Danish, English, German, HPSG This paper appeared 2013 in Stefan Müller (Ed): Proceedings of the 20th international conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Freie Universität Berlin, 140–160. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications, doi:10.21248/hpsg.2013.8.

We show how the variation in the passive in Danish, English, and German can be accounted for. The dimensions in which the three languages differ are

  • the existence of a morphological passive in Danish
  • a subject requirement in Danish and English resulting in expletive insertion in impersonal constructions in Danish and absence of impersonal passives in English
  • the possibility to promote the secondary object to subject in Danish
The differences are accounted for by differences in the structural/lexical case distinction and by mapping processes that insert expletives in Danish. The passive in general is accounted for by a lexical rule that is uniform across languages and hence captures the generalization regarding passive.

Draft of November 06, 2013: