Re: Passive voice

On 5/22/06, Henrik Theiling <theiling@...> wrote:
>     Er     kriegt eine Geschichte vorgelesen.
>     he.NOM gets   a    story.ACC  read.perfect_participle.
>     '?He is read a story.'
>     (Is this grammatical in English?)
Yes. Google for "are read a story", for example. "Is read a story"
also gets some appropriate hits but a fair number of irrelevant hits
as well.

> 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.
And such sentences (along with similar ones such as "Über die Brücke
wird gegangen") can change word order by the introduction of a dummy
subject "es" (literally, "it", but grammatically as salient as the
"il" in "il pleut" or the "it" in "it's raining"):

    Es wurde über ihn gesprochen.

(Literally, it was about him talked.)

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>