Early stages of periphrastic passive formation in Old Swedish
Early stages of periphrastic passive formation in Old Swedish

Summary/Abstract: This article discusses the construction [SBJ varda PTCP], which isconsidered an early example of a periphrastic passive, in the extant OldSwedish legal texts. It has been argued that it is a nascent passiveconstruction, different from the fully-fledged passive in Present DaySwedish. Based on a corpus study of all occurrences of the constructionacross Swedish provincial laws I argue that it bears all the hallmarks of agrammaticalized passive construction, with two exceptions. Firstly, itallows a wider choice of thematic roles of the subject, secondly, its mainpragmatic function is inactivization in the sense of Haspelmath (1990).The study is grounded in Diachronic Construction Grammar and utilizesthe typology of thematic roles proposed by Van Valin and LaPolla (1997).

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