Periphrastic passives of transition verbs in North American Danish: Loss and stability

Karoline Kühl (University of Copenhagen)

It has been stated by Hasselmo (2005: 2133) that North American Scandinavian is characterized by the overuse of være/vara ‘be’ (at the expense of blive/bli ‘become’) in forming the periphrastic passive of transition verbs, e.g. hon var tagen till hospitalet (instead of hon blev tagen till hospitalet) ‘she was taken to the hospital’ (examples from ibid.). However, the early research on North American Danish by Kjær and Baumann Larsen that Hasselmo refers to in his overview publication does not concern itself with the formation of passives. Thus, it seems that the statement that North American Scandinavian passive formation is characterized by an overuse of være/vara ‘be’ relies mainly on studies of American Swedish and North American Norwegian. For American Swedish, the vara-effect has been confirmed by more recent studies, e.g. Larsson, Tingsell og Andréasson (2015: 378), but North American Danish remains terra incognita (but see Kühl & Heegård Petersen forthc.).

European Danish distinguishes between stative passives and transitional passives in the use of auxiliaries: The use of blive ‘become’ denotes transition, the use of være ‘be’ denotes a state: Soldaten blev skudt ‘the soldier became shot’ denotes the transition from not being shot to being shot. In contrast, Soldaten var skudt ‘the soldier was shot’ indicates that the man has reached a state of shot-ness (he is dead) as a result of the transition of being shot (Juul Nielsen 2015: 445–448, Hansen & Heltoft 2011: 630).

The analysis of passive formation is based on a sample of the Corpus of North American Danish (CoNAmDa) of 348.825 words by 146 elderly emigrant and heritage speakers. The recordings, obtained by different researchers between 1966 and 1998, consist of loosely structured sociolinguistic interviews with a focus on the consultants’ lives (for further details of the corpus see Kühl et al. forthc.). Thus, beyond being interviews, the American Danish data contain many biographical narratives. As a means of comparison, we have used the LANCHART-corpus of spoken Danish which, at the time of the analysis, consisted of 8.756.000 words. The LANCHART-corpus also consists of sociolinguistic interviews with a focus on the informants’ lives (for details see Gregersen & Kristiansen 2015).

Preliminary studies of the CoNAmDa-sample indeed indicate a salient (over)use of være in forming the periphrastic passive, but mainly with the biographical transition verbs født ‘born’, konfirmeret ‘confirmed’ and gift ‘married’, and only in the past tense (preterite). The range of verbs seems to be caused by the text type of the interviews (biographical narratives). Both var konfirmeret ‘was/were confirmed’ and var gift ‘was/were married’ is used in contexts where European Danish uses blev konfirmeret/gift ‘became confirmed/married’, i.e. together with adverbials specifying points of time, place, agent or statement of the language used. In the case of var født ‘was/were born’, we do not observe a use that is considered ungrammatical in European Danish, but very salient overuse at the expense of blev født ‘became born’. This can be considered a case of Frequential Copying according to Johanson’s Code Interaction Framework (e.g. Johanson 2002) where a frequency distribution is copied from the source language to the target language without actual changes in the construction.

The talk aims at presenting a first survey of passive formation in North American Danish, but also in refining Hasselmo’s statement mentioned above for North American Danish: In general, the distinction between transitional and stative passives by auxiliary choice auxiliaries is retained, but we do observe loss to a certain degree, yet only in very specific contexts. In addition, language contact also has the effect of stabilizing one existing option, resulting in the simpler, yet stable construction var født ‘was/were born’.

References

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  • Kühl, Karoline & Jan Heegård Petersen (to appear) ’Var de gift eller blev de gift? Om biografiske overgang-sprædikater i amerikadansk.’ In MUDS (16).
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