Internationale Neerlandistiek - Volume 54, Issue 2, 2016

The impersonal passive in Dutch and Swedish

This paper gives an account of the impersonal passive in Dutch and Swedish and has two goals: first, to define the impersonal passive and second, to offer a corpus-based study of impersonal passives in both languages. Impersonal passives are defined as passive constructions encoding actions with a general reference. They are made up of an overt expletive subject, viz. er ‘there’ in Dutch and det ‘it’ in Swedish, combined with a passive predicate. A contrastive study of the impersonal passive gives a wider and in-depth analysis of this structure in both languages by applying knowledge from two grammatical traditions. The empirical part of the study reveals that impersonal passives occur more frequently in Dutch than in Swedish. Moreover, the empirical data show that elements such as telicity, transitivity and control come into play in an interesting way in impersonal passives.

Balancing between formal and familiar: about the dynamics of address pronouns in the radio show Casa Luna

This article concerns forms of address in Dutch and more specifically switching between formal and informal address forms in dialogue. As a mechanism for establishing politeness between conversation participants, the use of address forms is constantly subject to negotiation and renegotiation, not unlike the mixing of address forms in the medieval and early modern period. Sometimes switches between address forms can be the result of confusion, e.g. because of cultural differences between speakers, but more often they are used strategically to effect style changes and thus express affect. Switches are also used in irony and banter, which can be seen as specific instances of such style changes. Data for the study are drawn from 45-minute radio interviews which are subjected to a qualitative analysis.