The Passive as an Impersonalisation Strategy in Afrikaans and Dutch: A Corpus Investigation

ABSTRACT

Although a lot of research has been done on the use of pronouns to express impersonal meaning in West Germanic languages, relatively little is known about the use of other possible impersonalization strategies. This article therefore examines the agentless passive as a possible impersonalizing strategy in Afrikaans and Dutch. On the basis of corpus data, we show that the agentless passive is a productive strategy for impersonalization in both Afrikaans and Dutch –in that it is used in the entire range of impersonal contexts. However, it is more typically employed for corporate contexts and existential contexts where the subject is vague and number-neutral. Some variation in the use of the agentless passive in different genres are also seen. On the whole, however, the agentless passives behave very similarly in the two languages as an impersonalizing strategy.

KEYWORDS:

• Agentless passive
• existential
• human impersonal pronoun
• impersonalization
• passive
• universal

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. This research project received funding from the National Research Foundation of South Africa (https://www.nrf.ac.za/).

2. Gast and Van der Auwera, Translation corpora in contrastive linguistics, 119–158.

3. Malchukov and Siewierska, Impersonal constructions: a cross-linguistic perspective; De Cock and Kluge, Referential ambiguity of personal pronouns, 351–360.

4. De Hoop and Tarenskeen, It’s all about you, 163–175; Auer and Stukenbrock, When you mens I, 280–309; Haas, You can’t control a thing like that, 171–194; Fenger, How impersonal does one get, 291–325.

5. Posio and Vilkina, Referential dimensions of HIPs, 177–229; 2013; Gast, Impersonalization in English and German, 4–33; Haas, Changing HIPs in English.

6. Van Olmen and Breed, HIPS in Afrikaans, 1–29; Van Olmen and Breed, HIPs in West-Germanic, 798–846; also Section 2.2.

7. For clarity’s sake, we would like to stress the difference between the passive as an impersonalization strategy and the impersonal passive (see Kulikov 2011, p. 250–251). The latter term is typically reserved for constructions that demote an active subject but do not promote anything to be the passive subject. Dutch er wordt gedanst ‘there is dancing’ (lit. ‘there becomes danced’), with expletive subject er ‘there’, is a case in point. Such an impersonal passive may be employed to avoid referring to everyone or to a specific, known person or group of people, i.e. as an impersonalization strategy, but need not function that way. In er wordt gedanst door de gasten ‘there is dancing by the guests’, for instance, the human participants are clearly identified.

8. We refrain from calling this article a corpus linguistic study. Locating every single Afrikaans and Dutch passive in existing corpora in an automatic way is difficult (if not unfeasible). Searches would need to be so broad that finding the relevant hits amongst the ‘false positives’ would be a never-ending task. Our queries (see Section 3) therefore only target passives with a limited number of words between passive auxiliary and past participle. This decision prevents us from making definitive quantitative claims about, say, the overall (relative) frequency (per x number of words) of the agentless passive as an impersonalization strategy in Afrikaans versus Dutch. Our data will, however, still give us a good idea of, for instance, the different impersonal uses that the passive fulfils in the two languages.

9. This section is similar to the corresponding section in a paper submitted to another journal by the authors, from which most examples here have been taken too. The two articles are part of a larger project about impersonalization strategies in West Germanic and the theoretical background is thus also essentially the same.

10. Siewierska and Papastathi, Typology of third personal plural impersonals; see Notes 1 and 5 above.

11. See note 1 above.

12. See notes 1 and 9 above.

13. See note 5 above.

14. N/R is short for ‘not relevant’ and is added whenever a criterion does not actually help distinguish one context from another context.

15. Van Olmen and Breed, HIPS in Afrikaans, 6–7.

16. Siewierska and Papastathi, Typology of third personal plural impersonals, 587–588.

17. Taalkommissie van die Suid-Afrikaanse Akademie vir Wetenskap en Kuns, Taalkommissiekoprus 1.1.; Ponelis, Ponelis Gesproke Korpus van Afrikaans; Van Rooy, Korpus van Gesproke Afrikaans uit die Vroeë 2000’s.

18. Van Noord et al., Large scale syntactic annotation of written Dutch,147–164; Breed et al., Progressives in Afrikaans, 305–378; Nederlandse Taalunie, Corpus Gesproken Nederlands.

19. We are aware that there is variation between the Afrikaans and Dutch corpora. The spoken data, for example, is mostly from the 1970s for Afrikaans but from the 1990s for Dutch. The reason for this difference is the lack of (access to) other more recent, sizable speech corpora. Within such constraints, we have nevertheless chosen data that is as similar in the two languages as possible (e.g. non-broadcast interviews).

20. Extrapolations of our samples suggest, for example, that, in spoken Dutch, simple passives have a frequency of 121.52 instances per 100,000 words while perfect ones occur just 35.03 times per 100,000 words. (These figures were calculated as follows: dividing the number of all passives examined to reach the 100th impersonalizing one by the number of all randomized hits examined to reach the aforementioned point; applying this percentage to the total number of query hits; dividing the resulting number by the subcorpus size; and multiplying it by 100,000).

21. Van Eynde, Part of Speech Tagging en Lemmatisering van het CGN, 31.

22. Only sentences containing the impersonalizing passive are word-glossed.

23. An example is the formula for the UNI-INT-NVER-NMOD context: = IF(AND(C2 = ‘universal’; D2 = ‘internal’; E2 = ‘nonveridical’; F2 = ‘nonmodal’; G2 = ‘NA’; H2 = ‘NA’; I2 = ‘NA’); 1; 0)

24. Siewierska and Papastathi, Typology of third personal plural impersonals, 590.

25. Van Olmen and Breed, HIPS in Afrikaans, 19–20.

26. Van Olmen and Breed, HIPs in West-Germanic, 822, 838–839.

27. Siewierska, Man-constructions vs. third person plural-impersonal,

28. Zifonun, Morphosyntax und Semantik des Pronomens man, 232–253; Fonesca-Greber and Waugh, The difference between the subject personal pronouns in written and spoken French, 225–240.

29. Support for this hypothesis comes from the comparison of men’s relative frequencies with extrapolations of our sample data to the subcorpora in their entirety (i.e. determining the proportion of 100 impersonalizing passives to the number of randomized hits examined to reach the 100th relevant instance; applying this percentage to the total number of query hits; dividing the resulting number by the size of the subcorpus; and multiplying it by 100,000). Men and the impersonalizing passive (would) occur 44 versus 260 times per 100,000 words in newspapers, 49 versus 96 times in spoken language and 38 versus 151 times in fiction. Also see Duinhoven, Verdwijnt men, 70–80.

30. Van Olmen and Breed, HIPs in West-Germanic, 819, 838–834.

31. Van Olmen and Breed, HIPs in West-Germanic, 839.

32. Van Olmen and Breed, HIPS in Afrikaans, 17.

33. Van Olmen and Breed, HIPs in West-Germanic, 833.

34. Van Olmen and Breed, HIPs in Afrikaans, 24.

35. Van Olmen and Breed, HIPS in West-Germanics, 832–833.

36. Siewierska and Papastathi, Typology of third personal plural impersonals, 590.

37. Another such explanation that should be added to the list is the use of the passive for existential purposes when the context contains a potential referent for a third person plural pronoun. Speakers may wish to avoid impersonal hulle or ze in this kind of situation – as the addressee could very well understand it as personal – and draw on the passive (or men in Dutch) instead.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Adri Breed

Adri Breed is a NRF-rated associate professor in Afrikaans descriptive linguistics at the North-West University's Potchefstroom Campus. She specialises in syntax and semantics, with a particular focus on the grammaticalisation of tense and aspect constructions in Afrikaans and Dutch. She completed five degrees at the NWU, namely a degree in Business Communication (B.Bk. – 2005), a degree in Theology with languages (B.Th. Languages – 2005), an Honours degree in Afrikaans Linguistics (B.A. Hons. – 2007), a Master's degree Afrikaans Literature (M.A. – 2007) and her PhD in Afrikaans Linguistics in 2012. During the course of her doctoral studies, she spent roughly ten months at the University of Antwerp, Belgium as a research member of the UA's Center for Grammar, Cognition and Typology. She is subject head of the Subject Group: Afrikaans and Dutch Studies on the Potchefstroom Campus. She is vice-chair of the South African Association for Dutch Studies (SAVN), and also serve on the management of the Dutch Language Union's South African Northern Knowledge Network. She is a member of PanSALB's Afrikaans Language Body. Adri was one of the authors of Taalportaal – an international project that aims at the construction of a comprehensive and authoritative scientific grammar website for Dutch, Frisian and Afrikaans. She is an associate editor for the ISI-accredited journal, South African Language and Applied Language Studies. Currently, she is the editor-in-chief for the Virtual Institute of Afrikaans' general Afrikaans grammar and language education portal. 

Daniël Van Olmen

Daniël Van Olmen is an associate professor at Lancaster University (United Kingdom). His research focuses on tense, mood and modality, pragmatic markers, indefinites and negation from the perspectives of contrastive linguistics, linguistic typology, historical linguistics, areality and corpus linguistics. He has published in international journals about, inter alia, human impersonal pronouns in West Germanic, reproachative constructions in the languages of Europe and prohibitive negation in the world’s languages. His co-edited volumes concern grammaticalization, linguistic variation and imperative and directive strategies. He is currently one of the two editors-in-chief of De Gruyter’s Trends in Linguistics – Studies and Monographs book series (https://www.degruyter.com/view/serial/TILSM-B) Daniel Van Olmen ([email protected])