The passive voice in written and spoken Scandinavian

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Let us first look at the overall distribution of modals with passive complements, as presented in Table 9 for written language and Table 10 for spoken language. Danish Norwegian Swedish s-passive bli-passive s-passive bli-passive s-passive bli-passive modal passive 43.2% (120) 6.4% (10) 53.7% (145) 11.7% (19) 25.1% (129) – Total 278 156 270 162 513 7 Table 9. Modals with passive complement in written language The results from our newspaper corpus (Table 9) show two rather clear trends. It is the morphological passive that dominates in combination with the modal verb. This is so for all three languages, although the relative frequency between the languages varies quite substantially. The frequency is highest in Norwegian, where the morphological passive complement accounts for 53.7% of all s-passives, and lowest in Swedish, where it accounts for one-fourth of all s-passives. Modal verbs with periphrastic passive complements are rare in all three languages. Norwegian, again, has the highest number of modal passives (11.7%). In the Swedish sample, the periphrastic passive construction turned out to be very infrequent (7 occurrences); none of these occurred together with a modal verb. Danish Norwegian Swedish s-passive bli-passive s-passive bli-passive s-passive bli-passive modal passive 88.5% (549) 3.4% (70) 61.0% (130) 4.5% (37) 25.3% (193) 9.8% (14) Total 620 2066 213 830 764 143 Table 10. Modals with passive complement in spoken language Turning to the results in the spoken language corpora (Table 10), some changes can be noticed, although the overall tendencies remain the same as in written language. Here again the morphological passive is dominating in modal constructions, whereas the frequency of modal verbs with a periphrastic passive complement remains under 10%. Swedish has the highest proportion (9.8%) and Danish the lowest (3.4%). 24
Although the morphological passive complement is highest in all three languages, the relative frequency varies even more from language to language than was the case for written language. In Swedish, morphological passive complements account for approximately one-fourth of all morphological passives (which is the same result as in the written language). In Norwegian, the same constructions account for 61%. In Danish, on the other hand, the morphological passive complements with modal verbs constitute almost 90% of all occurrences of morphological passives. Thus, in all three languages there is a clear tendency that modal verbs are preferably used with morphological passives, rather than with periphrastic (blive) passives. In addition, an interesting tendency emerged in connection with modal passives in spoken Danish. Thus, it is not only the morphological passive that dominates in modal constructions; it is overwhelmingly in this construction that Danish morphological passives are used (88.5% of all occurrences). In order to explain this predominant use of the morphological passive in connection with modal verbs in spoken Danish, a closer look at these constructions is needed. Looking through the examples of modal passive, it appears that almost three-fourths of them occur with the modal verb skal/skulle, ‘must, shall’. The majority of the remaining one-fourth occurs with the modal verb kan/kunne, ‘can, may’, and only a few examples occur together with other modal verbs, such as må/måtte ‘may, must’, and vil/ville, ‘will, want’. As discussed above, the modal verb skal in combination with the morphological passive in Danish is claimed to express non-epistemic (non- subjective) modality, meaning obligation or instruction. Examples like this are common in the Danish spoken language corpus (BySoc); some of them are given in (14a–c). (14) (a) undervisningen skal gøres interessant og levende så barnet føler det ‘the teaching has to be made interesting and lively so the child gets attentive’ (b) pigen synes der skal støvsuges før manden synes der skal støvsuges ‘the girl thinks it needs to be vacuum-cleaned before the man thinks it needs to be vacuum-cleaned’ 25
Page 1 and 2: The passive voice in written and sp
Page 3 and 4: morphological passive voice between
Page 5 and 6: Heltoft 1996, Faarlund et al. 1997,
Page 7 and 8: (2) (c) Mina bilder blir ofta anvä
Page 9 and 10: As discussed by Engdahl (2006: 25f)
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Page 13 and 14: all modern Scandinavian languages (
Page 15 and 16: 3 Corpus investigation The followin
Page 17 and 18: Table 4 gives an overview of the us
Page 19 and 20: Written language Spoken language s-
Page 21 and 22: In the Danish spoken language corpu
Page 23: 3.5 Modals with passive complement
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Page 29 and 30: References Åfarli, Tor. 1992. The

The passive voice in written and spoken Scandinavian

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