The Double Passive in Swedish : A case of creating raising verbs in the Scandinavian languages.

Sammanfattning: The primary aim of this thesis is to map the syntactic and semantic nature, and the frequency of the Double Passive in Swedish. The results showed that the Double Passive is a control construction where the internal argument (OBJ) of the embedded verb is raised to subject of the s-passive matrix verb, and the verb of the infinitival complement co-occurs as an s-passive infinitive. In the thesis Lexical functional grammar (LFG) is used as a model for semantic and syntactic analysis. The analysis showed that when the AGENT in a Double Passive construction is suppressed, it creates an argument structure that triggers an equi verb to occur as a raising verb (cf. Ørsnes 2006:404). Overt agents within constructions containing the Double Passive showed an even lower frequency than the low frequencies documented in previous research of passive constructions by Silén (1997) and Laanemets (2010). The lower frequency is partly a result of the fact that agents in a Double Passive construction are suppressed twice. The results of a corpus study showed a frequency of 3.57 % of overt agents within constructions containing Double Passives. The complementizer att ‘to’ in the subordinated infinitive clause of a Double Passive is overtly expressed, partly depending on the degree of modality of the matrix verb (cf. Sundman 1983; Teleman 1999; Lagerwall 1999), and the degree of semantic bonding between the matrix verb and the complement (Givón 2001b). The data (matrix verbs) collected in the corpus study were analysed according to a categorising-system in SAG (Teleman et al. 1999) and in Givón (2001a) and Givón (2001b). The matrix verbs with strong nominal (lexical) properties, e.g. planera ‘plan’, showed a high frequency of co-occurrence with full infinitives, as compared to matrix verbs with largely grammatical meaning, e.g. avse ‘intend’.