Form, Meaning and Aspect in the German Impersonal Passive

This book presents a new analysis of both the German impersonal passive and the actional passive, in general. The study challenges previous analyses and uses a theoretical framework derived from Saussure and Beedham.

"Actional passives are conventionally considered to be the result of a voice analysis conversion process. They are said to derive from semantically identical underlying actives, even though most passives do not contain the agent - the entity carrying outthe action - that would be crucial to such a conversion. Beedham''s aspect analysis offered an alternative perspective which discarded any notion of a mandatory connection to the active, and instead proposed that passive formation requires only a lexically telic verb, compositional telicity and a patient (affected entity) subject. This book challenges both these analyses via an empirical investigation into the somewhat neglected impersonal passive in German of the type Es wurde getanzt, which, as a zero argument, atelic construction, exists as an exception to both the voice and aspect analysis rules. Using the theoretical framework of Saussurean structuralism and Beedham''s ''method of exceptions and their correlations'', this book presents a new, ''event focused'' analysis of both this impersonal passive and the German actional passive, in general; plus, it proposes that since Es wurde getanzt, as the barest form of passive and the closest realisation of the werden + ge-V-t core of all passives, is atelic, this werden passive core too is atelic"--