On the genesis of the German recipient passive – Two competing hypotheses in the light of current dialect data

The focus of this paper is on the genesis of the German recipient passive (German GET passive). Although much theoretical and empirical research has already been carried out, there are still a number of unresolved questions concerning this phenomenon. One central problem still disputed is the genesis of the passive construction. According to the research literature, (at least) two different historical pathways are plausible. In this paper, these hypotheses are evaluated against the results. of corpus analyses based on historical and current language data.