Het onpersoonlijk passief in het Nederlands en het Zweeds

Abstract The impersonal passive in Dutch and Swedish This paper gives an account of the impersonal passive in Dutch and Swedish and has two goals: first, to define the impersonal passive and second, to offer a corpus-based study of impersonal passives in both languages. Impersonal passives are defined as passive constructions encoding actions with a general reference. They are made up of an overt expletive subject, viz. er ‘there’ in Dutch and det ‘it’ in Swedish, combined with a passive predicate. A contrastive study of the impersonal passive gives a wider and in-depth analysis of this struct... Mehr ...