The Double Passive in Swedish - Institutionen för lingvistik ...

(9) a) Active:
John servera-r Jane.
3SG serve-PRS 3SG
SUBJ OBJ
‘John is serving Jane.’
b) Passive:
Jane servera-s av John.
3SG serve-PASS by 3SG
SUBJ OBLag
‘Jane is being served by John’.
Passivization is often referred to as an agent demoting process in the literature (Laanemets, 2012).
2.3 Lexical functional grammar
In the thesis Lexical functional grammar (LFG) is used as a model for semantic and syntactic analysis.
LFG is a theory where the explicit representation of morphosyntactic information is displayed by
syntactic structures – the lexicon, words and unification is essential in the grammar (cf. Van Valin,
2001; Kroeger, 2008; Bresnan, 2001). A special feature of LFG is that it analyses clauses in terms of
at least three 5 distinct parallel levels of representation (Austin, 2001:6-16):
C-structure – The constituent structure analyses the constituents in terms of word order, and phrasal
grouping in the form of context-free phrase structure trees.
F-structure – The functional structure deal with functional information/features such as grammatical
functions like SUBJ, OBJ and also with functions of discourse like TOPIC. The information is
displayed in matrices of attribute-value pairs.
A-structure – The argument structure deals with predicate argument information. E.g. number and
type of arguments of an argument and the semantic role assigned by arguments, cf. (12). A-structures
are displayed as arrays and predicates and argument slots with associated semantic roles such as
AGENT, PATIENT and EXPERIENCER 6 .
Below the relations between the f- and c-structures are shown according to an example of an English
passive clause taken from Van Valin (2001:191) in (Figure 1).
5 There are several other structures which are hypothesized in LFG work. However, solely the structures
displayed in (2.3) are used in the thesis (cf. Falk, 2001).
6
The semantic roles are taken from Kroeger (2008:9) and Lyngfelt (2007). Lyngfelt prefers to devide the agent
role into agentive/cause which is partly applied in this thesis).
EXPERIENCER; animate entity, which perceives a stimulus or registers a particular mental or emotional process
or state. INSTRUMENT; inanimate entity which undergoes a change of location or possession, or whose location
is being specified. PATIENT; entity which is acted upon, affected, or created – or of which a state or change is
predicated.
12