Re: Passive voice

Hi!

Roger Mills writes:
> Henrik Theiling wrote:
>...
> > Using indirect passive, you can promote 'Junge' to a subject:
> >
> >    Der Junge bekommt die Lektion beigebracht
> >    NOM               ACC         PASS
> >    the boy   gets    the lesson  taught.
> >    'The boy is taught the lesson.'
>
> As you show here, and in previous examples, DO and IO can be promoted to
> subject BUT it requires (it seems) a totally different verb or an
> applicative form of some sort.
No, no, in German, this is different from before, i.e., from the
prepositional phrase example.  The indirect passive (promoting dative
to nominative), is grammaticalized in German, unlike promoting
obliques to subject (which is also possible in English).  That was the
point about writing another post. :-P

I might have confused the matter by using 'beibringen' and still
mentioning 'lehren', the obvious translation of 'to teach'.  Sorry
about that...  The latter just does not have a dative object: it has
two accusative objects and thus cannot be used as an example.
'Beibringen' has NOM.ACC.DAT structure and is thus an example for the
generic phenomenon of promoting dative to nominative in German by
means of voice.

> The thing about Engl. of course is that you can passivize DO or IO
> of any bi-valent verb, without such recourse-- give, buy, sell, et
> al. AFAICT, you can't say in German--
>
> Er wird ein Buch gegeben "he was given a book"
This is ungrammatical, yes.  But this would be the *only* special
ditransitive verb in German, because from *this* special
transformation of the indirect object of 'to give' into a nominative,
namely by using a different verb 'kriegen', all the other verbs that
can do so lend the auxiliary for the indirect passive 'kriegen'.  The
above in indirect passive would be:

   Er kriegt ein Buch.  (or '...bekommt...' in more formal German)
   He gets   a   book.

Trivial, yes.  But this 'kriegen' is generalised to all other
ditransitives in German.

So yes, this special case needs a different verb, but that's an
exception from which the regular case derives.

The other example 'beibringen' is the regular case: ditransitive, and
dative case is promoted to nominative by using 'kriegen' (or
'bekommen') as auxiliary.  Another case:

    Ich   lese ihm     eine Geschichte vor.
    i.NOM read him.DAT a    story.ACC
    I read a story to him.

(Note that this instance of 'to read' is 'vorlesen' and not 'lesen' in
German, thus the final 'vor').

Regular indirect passive voice:

    Er     kriegt eine Geschichte vorgelesen.
    he.NOM gets   a    story.ACC  read.perfect_participle.
    '?He is read a story.'
    (Is this grammatical in English?)
    'To him, a story is read.'

Another one:

    Ich schenke           dem Mann    das Buch.
    I   give_as_a_present the man.DAT the book.ACC.
    'I give the book to the man as a present.'

Indirect passive voice:

    Der Mann    kriegt das Buch     geschenkt.
    The man.NOM gets   the book.ACC given_as_a_present
    'The man is given the book as a present.'

> Or, to mangle the ex. above,
> "Der Junge wird die Lektion gelehrt
>  NOM              ACC
>
> Or can you????? :-))))
Yes.  Only both 'lehren' and 'geben' are inappropriate verbs for
examples (for different reasons).  But 'beibringen', 'vorlesen',
'schenken' and other ditransitives are regular in structure.  And the
auxiliary for forming indirect passive voice is 'kriegen' (or
'bekommen') instread of 'werden' for direct passive voice.

Ok, that's all for indirect objects in dative case where indirect
passive voice can be used.  For adjuncts, it does not work.  Something
like the following does not work in German:

    We talked about him.
->  He was talked about.

(Note 'him' vs. 'he', a contrast not possible to install by regular
means in German here.)

This would require something different.  The normal way would be to
use normal passive voice, but keeping the adjunct (and thus the case),
but in initial position:

   Über ihn wurde gesprochen.
   about him was  talked.

Another way would be to use a different verb (e.g. an applicative).

I hope I clarified more than to confuse this time...

**Henrik

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