The passive voice in written and spoken Scandinavian

(c) der skulle jo sikkert også skrælles mange kartofler ~ ja vi var jo syv børn
‘probably there needed to be peeled a lot of potatoes ~ you see, we were seven
children’
In addition to the previous examples there are also examples with other meanings of
the construction (skal + morphological passive) available in Danish. Consider the
following examples in (15a, b).
(15) (a) alle havde virkelig sat sig op til ~ nu skal der altså bare fejres jubilæum ik
‘everybody had really prepared themselves ~ now we were really ready to
celebrate the jubilee’
(b) han skulle giftes ~ og så ~ altså anede jeg ikke hvor hvor det skulle holdes
men lige pludselig så blev det sagt til morgenbordet
‘he is going to marry ~ and then ~ well, I did not know where it would take
place but all of a sudden it was mentioned at the breakfast table’
The first example (15a) is neither an obligation nor an instruction to celebrate the
jubilee. It is rather a prospective plan (or wish) of the people (alle, ‘everybody’) who
have made themselves ready for the event. The second example, (15b), in the
preterite tense, should be interpreted as the speaker being unaware of where the
wedding will take place.
According to our corpus data, these two readings both seem to be productive
in Danish. A more extensive investigation of the spoken language data is needed, but
it is likely that there is considerable variation in the use and meaning of Danish
modal passives (as also suggested by Brandt (1999)).
4 Concluding remarks
The analysis has pointed to both similarities and differences in the use of the passive
voice in the three Scandinavian languages. The differences and similarities are found
both across the languages and across the spoken and written register. The largest
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