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Re: Passive voice

From:Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
Date:Tuesday, May 23, 2006, 15:09
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@...>