How much bekommen is there in the German bekommen passive?
We present an experiment and a corpus study jointly examining possible semantic constraints on the formation of the bekommen passive in German. In particular, we address the question of whether the recipient role that the lexical verb bekommen (‘get’) assigns to its external argument still constrains the formation of the bekommen passive. We capture this potential restriction in the Recipient Constraint. Our data show a split between verbs whose dative object is not a recipient – many of them are perfectly acceptable in the bekommen passive, but some are not. We conclude that the Recipient Constraint does not hold, but the formation of the bekommen passive is still sensitive to semantic properties of the main verb use of bekommen.
Cited by (3)
Cited by three other publications
Czypionka, Anna, Laura Dörre & Josef Bayer
2018.
Inverse Case attraction: experimental evidence for a syntactically guided process.
The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 21:2
► pp. 135 ff.

Alexiadou, Artemis, Elena Anagnostopoulou & Christina Sevdali
2014.
Opaque and transparent datives, and how they behave in passives.
The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 17:1
► pp. 1 ff.

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