Dagmar Haumann

Dagmar Haumann, Department of Foreign Languages and Translation, University of Agder: Middles and reflexives: a contrastive view on non-canonical passives in English, German and Norwegian

The talk is concerned with the interpretive and syntactic properties of non-canonical passives, viz. English and German middles and the Norwegian ‘–s passive’:

(1) Bananas and kiwis peel easily.
(2) Bananen und Kiwis schälen sich leicht.
(3) Banan og kiwi skrelles. [www.mat.no/aftenposten_article.aspx?artid=6624]

The restrictions on middle formation are much stricter than those on the formation of the ‘–s passive’ (e.g. aspectual restrictions, restrictions on the structural subject, obligatory adverbial), and English and German middles mainly differ with respect to the absence vs. presence of a morphosyntactic voice marker, viz. the reflexive element ‘sich’. The contrasts between the two types of non-canonical passives as well as the contrasts between English and German middles serve as the background for an exploration of both the morphosyntactic status of the reflexive element in non-canonical passives, viz. ‘sich’ in German and ‘–s’ in Norwegian, and of the syntactic structure(s) of the non-canonical passives under consideration.