The passive voice in written and spoken Scandinavian

The analysis of the passive subjects in this article points out two aspects.
Namely, the dominant use of inanimate subjects in connection with morphological
passives on the one hand, and the almost as dominant use of animate subjects in
connection with periphrastic (blive) passives.
Finally, modal verbs with passive complements were examined. All three
languages showed a clear tendency to prefer morphological rather than periphrastic
passive complements. This tendency applies to both written and spoken language.
The most striking result thus emerged in connection with spoken Danish, where the
modal constructions with the morphological passive accounted for almost 90% of all
uses of morphological passives in our material.
28