Das Passiv im Deutschen: Agenten, Blockaden und (De-) Gradierungen

Zifonun, Gisela

doi:10.1515/9783110622447-011

Cited by 5 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…Furthermore, coercion is not always an option, as some predicates resist inchoative readings 16c 17, despite being a verbal passive, is only interpreted as attributing the property of being feared or appreciated to Hans. Importantly, the corresponding adjectival passive (with the copula sein 'be') in this case would be ungrammatical in German, but becomes more acceptable with additional modification by bei/von allen 'at/by all' or weltweit 'worldwide' (recall our discussion in §2.1; see also Zifonun 1992, Zifonun, Hoffmann & Strecker 1997 for earlier discussions of this point). This difference between German and Italian is likely to be attributed to the fact that Italian venire is a marked form, the Italian default auxiliary for passivization being essere 'be', which can introduce both adjectival (in its copular interpretation) and verbal passives.…”

Section: Interpreting Unambiguous Verbal Passives In Germanmentioning

confidence: 95%

Processing unambiguous verbal passives in German

et al. 2018

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Passivization played a central role in shaping both linguistic theory and psycholinguistic approaches to sentence processing, language acquisition and impairment. We present the results of two experiments that simultaneously test online processing (self-paced reading) and offline comprehension (through comprehension questions) of passives in German while also manipulating the event structure of the predicates used. In contrast to English, German passives are unambiguously verbal, allowing for the study of passivization independent of a confound in the degree of interpretive ambiguity (verbal/adjectival). In English, this ambiguity interacts with event structure, with passives of stative predicates naturally receiving an adjectival interpretation. In a recent study, Paolazzi et al. (2015, 2016) showed that in contrast to the mainstream theoretical perspective, passive sentences are not inherently harder to process than actives. Complexity of passivization in English is tied to the aspectual class of the verbal predicate passivized: with eventive predicates, passives are read faster (as hinted at in previous literature) and generate no comprehension difficulties (in contrast to previous findings with mixed predicates). Complexity effects with passivization, in turn, are only found with stative predicates. The asymmetry is claimed to stem from the temporary adjectival/verbal ambiguity of stative passives in English. We predict that the observed difficulty with English stative passives disappears in German, given that in this language the passive construction under investigation is unambiguously verbal. The results support this prediction: both offline and online there was no difficulty with passivization, under either eventive or stative predicates. In fact, passives and their rich morphology eased parsing across both types of predicates.

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Section: Interpreting Unambiguous Verbal Passives In Germanmentioning

confidence: 95%

Processing unambiguous verbal passives in German

et al. 2018

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“…One of the peculiarities of transitive experiencer-object verbs is their behavior with respect to passivization. In German, regular passives are prototypically dynamic and agentive (see Zifonun 1992). This property interacts with the agentivity of experiencer-object verbs in such a way that a regular eventive passive (by means of the passive auxiliary werden ‘become’) of a ±agentive experiencer-object verb can only be formed under the verb's agentive reading.…”

Section: Background On the Grammar Of Experiencersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Thematic Asymmetries Do Matter! A Corpus Study of German Word Order

Verhoeven

2015

J Ger Ling

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This article addresses the question of whether the influence of thematic roles (in particular, experiencers and patients) on word order is an epiphenomenal effect of other factors (such as information structure and animacy). For this purpose, I have investigated argument realization with different verb classes, including canonical verbs and either agentive or nonagentive experiencer-object verbs with varying case marking (dative or accusative), in a large corpus of written German. The obtained results indicate that the experiencer-first effect is at least to some extent triggered by other factors, in particular animacy. However, after subtracting the effect resulting from these factors, the impact of the thematic properties remains, and therefore it is necessary to explain the whole range of data.*

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“…Despite some minor differences having to do with word order contrasts between English and German (Doherty 1996), the motivations for using the passive, as well as the constraints on the passivizability of transitive verbs, are the same in German (on the use of the German passive see Eroms 1974;Schoenthal 1976;Zifonun 1992;Zifonun et al 1997Zifonun et al , 1837Eisenberg 1999, 127;König / Gast 2007, 132). The same holds for the frequency distribution of passives as opposed to actives in German, as mentioned in the introduction.…”

Section: Use Of Passives In English and Germanmentioning

confidence: 99%

Symmetric verbs and constraints on passivization: An English-German comparison

Haas¹

2008

Zeitschrift Für Anglistik Und Amerikanistik

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Constraints on passivization have mainly been formulated in terms of semantic properties of verbs and their arguments. Comparative data from English and German suggest that at least in some areas of the lexicon other factors are at work as well. Different uses of the English verb meet have been investigated with respect to their occurrence in the active and passive diatheses. It turns out that there are striking differences between these uses, for some (near) categorical and for others in terms of frequency. A comparison to their German counterparts, each realized as a formally distinct lexeme and each conforming to the general frequency distribution of actives and passives in German, reveals that semantic and pragmatic motivations cannot sufficiently account for the distribution in English. I propose that verb senses and voice values are associated in such a way that semantic ambiguities are minimized.

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Das Passiv im Deutschen: Agenten, Blockaden und (De-) Gradierungen

Cited by 5 publications

References 0 publications

Processing unambiguous verbal passives in German

Processing unambiguous verbal passives in German

Thematic Asymmetries Do Matter! A Corpus Study of German Word Order

Symmetric verbs and constraints on passivization: An English-German comparison

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