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 ...

Verfasser: Beliën, Maaike
Dokumenttyp: Artikel
Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
Reihe/Periodikum: Linguistics in the Netherlands ; Linguistics in the Netherlands 2016 ; volume 33, page 1-13 ; ISSN 0929-7332 1569-9919
Verlag/Hrsg.: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Sprache: Englisch
Permalink: https://search.fid-benelux.de/Record/base-27434824
Datenquelle: BASE; Originalkatalog
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Link(s) : http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/avt.33.01bel

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 with vallen ‘fall’ and sterven ‘die’. The paper concludes that also with these telic non-volitional verbs, the impersonal passive merely conveys the occurrence of the type of act described by the verb, without specifying whether this occurrence is constituted by a single or multiple events, or whether it involves one or more participants.