On 5 October, Erik Magnusson Petzell from the Swedish Institute for Language and Folklore will talk about two ways of forming the passive voice in Scandinavian languages. The talk is followed by a Q&A and fika. The talk will be held in English.
In the Mainland Scandinavian languages, there are two types of expressions of passive voice. First, there is the morphological passive, which involves the bound morpheme -s(t) added to the verb. Second, there is the periphrastic passive, where the auxiliary ‘become’ (or ‘be’) is combined with a past participle.
Swedish and Norwegian are structurally similar in many respects, not least in the domain of morpho-syntax. Often, Swedish and Norwegian have chosen one path and Danish another, e.g., in definite noun phrases, where the definite suffix is lacking in Danish (det store hus, ‘the big house’) but mandatory in Swedish/Norwegian (det stora/store hus-et, ‘the big house-def').
However, when it comes to the expression of passive voice, Norwegian and Swedish are surprisingly different. In Swedish, the morphological passive is the unmarked choice, and the passive s-ending may be added to verbs of all tenses (e.g., skrev-s ‘wrote-pass’). By contrast, the Norwegian morphological passive is highly restricted (cf. *skrev-s). Instead, it is the periphrastic passive that is the dominant type (e.g., ble skrevet lit. ‘became written’).
Erik Magnusson Petzell, an Associate Professor/Reader at the Institute for Language and Folklore (known as Institutet för språk och folkminnen, or Isof) in Gothenburg, Sweden will show that the passive difference between Swedish and Norwegian becomes much less sharp once dialectal data are brought into the equation. He draws his examples from a dialect sample from the island of Orust in the province of Bohuslän. Bohuslän is in western Sweden today but was part of Norway until the mid-17th century.
