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Article published In:
Linguistics in the Netherlands 2016
Edited by Jenny Audring and Sander Lestrade
[Linguistics in the Netherlands 33] 2016
► pp. 1–13

Dutch impersonal passives

Beyond volition and atelicity

| Delft University of Technology

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.

Keywords: impersonal passive, unaccusativity, Dutch, volitionality, telicity, attested examples
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Types of verbs claimed to be compatible with the Dutch impersonal passive
  • 3.Frequencies of individual intransitive verbs occurring in the impersonal passive
  • 4. Analyzing the telicity of impersonal passives with vallen ‘fall’ and sterven ‘die’
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 21 December 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/avt.33.01bel
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2019. A corpus-based contrastive study of impersonal passives in Swedish and Dutch. Languages in Contrast 19:1 ► pp. 2 ff. DOI logo

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