The Passive Constructions in the 16th and 17th century Danish and Swedish

Abstract

The paper discusses the diachronic developments the passive voice constructions, morphological s-passive and periphrastic bli-passive, in closely related North Germanic languages, Danish and Swedish. The point of departure is the different distribution of the constructions, as well as their different semantics, in modern languages. The study is based on a corpus of late 16th and 17th century texts, which have been annotated for a number of factors connected with voice and tense. The results show that although the modern passive system is not yet fully formed in either language, by the end of the 17th century significant differences between the languages have already arisen, with respect to the distribution of the passive constructions. In particular, the results show that the Danish s-passive is found with modal verbs to a higher extent than the s-passive in Swedish. At the same time, the bli-passive in both languages is connected with animate subjects.