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

However, the LFG-analysis failed to explain the imposed restrictions on the voice of their embedded
complement (Ørsnes, 2006:401). As a fact, the LFG-analysis does not explain the presence of
constraining equations in the lexical entry shown in (59):
(59) (áXCOMP VFORM) =c PASS.SFO
(áXCOMP VOICE) =c PASS
Since raising constructions do not otherwise impose restrictions on the voice of their embedded
complement (Ørsnes, 2006:401), this fact is left unexplained. The failure to explain the imposed
restrictions on the voice of their embedded complement signals that LFG is not optimal for analysis of
the Double Passive.
The second hypothesis; that explicitly expressed agents within passive constructions containing the
Double Passive will show a low frequency, was confirmed based on the results of the data of the
corpus study (cf. 5.1.3).
It was also suggested that the frequency of overt agents would be even lower, than the results shown in
previous research of agents in passive voice, depending on a suggestion that the agent in a Double
Passive is actually suppressed twice. The mapping in (5.2) led to this conclusion (cf. Figure 12).
Both overt animate and inanimate agents within passive constructions containing the Double Passive
showed a low frequency (3.57 %) out of a total frequency of 1 905 collected constructions containing
Double Passives. In comparison to previous studies, the frequency of overt agents is even lower in
occurrence with Double Passives. In Laanemets (1997) study (cf. section 2.4.3), overt agents were
found in 12,9 % of the data of written Swedish and in 8.9 % of the data of spoken Swedish.
The low frequency of inanimate agents of the infinitival complement of a Double Passive is suggested
by the author to depend on the relations of the matrix verb (Pollard & Sag, 1991:65) of commitment,
promise and orientation types. These types of relations are most often related to an action being/not
being performed by an animate agent (SAG 1, 1999:152), cf. sections (2.4.1) and (2.4.3).
A major time consuming problem during the procedure of the corpus study, was the inability to
copy/paste the hits of clauses in Korp. A manual copy/paste procedure from Korp into TXT-files had
to be executed due to the lack of a proper file-export function. When using the clusters function in
AntConc, the frequency had to be manually counted since the words appeared multiple times in
AntConc and therefore automated export an counting was not possible (Example: 3 hits of ‘planeras’
in an excel file, was shown as 1 ‘planeras’ in AntConc). The lack of a representative corpus of spoken
Swedish language was seemingly strong, due to the fact that a true comparison between spoken and
written Swedish regarding the ability to express full ore bare infinitives was not possible. This is
especially the case when analysing constructions of low frequency in the Swedish language.
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