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

In (Figure 11), the agent is suppressed, which creates an argument structure that triggers an equi verb
to behave as a raising verb. The mapping in (Figure 11) also illustrates that the agent is suppressed
twice.
Bilen planera-s (Ø) skrota-s (Ø)
Car:the plan-PASS scrap:INF-PASS
‘As for the car, it is being planned to be scrapped’.
Figure 11. Non-overt agents in the Double Passive creates a raising construction.
The subject relation is not associated with a semantic role in the argument structure of (Figure 11), so
the Double Passive is a functionally controlled raising construction, cf. (55):
(55) planera < Ø, prop>
OBLag XCOMP
5.2.2 Semantic bonding
When the ten verbs chosen from the corpus research (cf. Table 2) was sorted according to Givón’s
(2001a:69-80) semantic sub-groups (Cf. Appendix C), they occurred in the following categories:
Modality verb Positive modal attitude: ’avse’ (‘intend’), ‘planera’
(‘plan’), ‘förvänta’ (‘expect’), ‘beräkna’ (‘calculate’),
‘riskera’ (‘risk’).
Manipulation verbs Successful manipulation: ’tvinga’ (’force’).
Attempted manipulation: ‘tillåta’ (‘allow’), ‘föreslå’
(‘suggest’), ‘hota’ (‘threat’).
PCU verbs Non-factive (positive): ‘påstå’ (‘claim’).
The modality verbs are dominating in frequency (1 401 hits), and among several groups of modality
verbs, the modality verbs solely occurred in the group “Positive modal attitude” (Givón 2001a). There
are four Manipulation verbs according to the mapping, but the total frequency (578 hits) is no were
near the dominating modals. Out of the ten verbs, one hit of a PCU verb was identified (26 hits). The
Distribution of the 10 verbs according to group of semantic bonding is shown in (Table 7):
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