Dutch impersonal passives ; Beyond volition and atelicity

Abstract Dutch impersonal passives are often considered to be only compatible with atelic volitional verbs, such as werken ‘work’, lachen ‘laugh’, and zwemmen ‘swim’. Two recent corpus studies, however, argue that a wider range of verbs is compatible with the construction, presenting examples of attested impersonal passives with telic and non-volitional verbs. This paper lends further support to this view, by providing an exploratory study of the frequencies of different intransitive verbs appearing in the construction, as well as a discussion of the telicity of attested impersonal passives wi... Mehr ...