The role of tense-copying and syncretism in the licensing of morphological passives in the nordic languages

This paper discusses the morphological passive (the so‐called ‐s(t) passive) in Swedish, Danish, Bokmål and Nynorsk. There are two problematic aspects about the morphological passive: (1) in all the languages mentioned except Swedish, it is restricted to certain tenses and/or conjugation classes, an...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Studia linguistica 2016-08, Vol.70 (2), p.180-220
Main Author: Lundquist, Björn
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Clitics
Conjugation
Danish language
Declension
Licensing
Morphology
Norwegian language
Passive voice
Scandinavian languages
Semantics
Swedish language
Syntactic features
Tense
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Summary:This paper discusses the morphological passive (the so‐called ‐s(t) passive) in Swedish, Danish, Bokmål and Nynorsk. There are two problematic aspects about the morphological passive: (1) in all the languages mentioned except Swedish, it is restricted to certain tenses and/or conjugation classes, and (2) from a theoretical perspective, it constitutes what looks like a mirror violation: the passive voice‐marker surfaces outside of the tense‐marker, even though it arguably originates between tense and the lexical verb. I argue that previous analyses of the passive ‐s(t) as either a clitic realizing the external argument (Julien 2007), or as a mood marker (Heltoft and Jakobsen 1996) can neither explain the tense/declension class restrictions, nor the semantics of the ‐s(t)‐passive. I argue instead that morphological passives in Danish, Bokmål and Nynorsk never contain a tense projection, and they are licensed in finite contexts when the finite form is form‐identical with a non‐finite form, that “fools” the syntax in the C‐phase of the clause (where at least some of the underlying syntactic features of the lexical items are no longer active). In Swedish on the other hand, the tensed forms are licensed through Tense‐copying, which is known to exist in Swedish to a much higher degree than in the other Scandinavian languages (Wiklund 2007). My proposal thus gets around the mirror‐violation, and manages to relate the variation in restrictions on morphological passives to other familiar differences between the languages, namely differences in conjugation classes and the availability of tense copying.
ISSN:0039-3193
1467-9582
DOI:10.1111/stul.12036