Form, Meaning and Aspect in the German Impersonal Passive Paperback / softback

by Michelle Leese

Part of the Contemporary Studies in Descriptive Linguistics series

Paperback / softback

Out of stock

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Â«Michelle Leese's book is a must-read for those interested in the German impersonal passive.

Based on an experimental study of almost 400 zero-argument passives she convincingly shows that this allegedly "exceptional" passive is the very core from which all werden-passives in their meaning as "event-focused action" are derived.Â»(Petra M.

Vogel, Professor of German Linguistics, University of Siegen, Germany)Â«This book presents a vast amount of original data to confront a glaring weakness of the aspect analysis of the German passive: if the actional passive is telic, why is the impersonal passive of the type Es wurde getanzt atelic?

The answer given is a revelation delightful in its simplicity.Â»(Dr Christopher Beedham, Honorary Lecturer, Department of German, University of St Andrews, Scotland)Actional passives are conventionally considered to be the result of a voice analysis conversion process.

They are said to derive from semantically identical underlying actives, even though most passives do not contain the agent â€“ the entity carrying out the action â€“ that would be crucial to such a conversion.

Beedhamâ€™s aspect analysis offered an alternative perspective which discarded any notion of a mandatory connection to the active, and instead proposed that passive formation requires only a lexically telic verb, compositional telicity and a patient (affected entity) subject. This book challenges both these analyses via an empirical investigation into the somewhat neglected impersonal passive in German of the type Es wurde getanzt, which, as a zero-argument, atelic construction, exists as an exception to both the voice and aspect analysis rules.

Using the theoretical framework of Saussurean structuralism and Beedhamâ€™s Â«method of exceptions and their correlationsÂ», this book presents a new, Â«event-focusedÂ» analysis of both this impersonal passive and the German actional passive in general; plus, it proposes that since Es wurde getanzt, as the barest form of passive and the closest realisation of the werden + ge-V-t core of all passives, is atelic, this werden-passive core too is atelic.