Impersonal passives are like activities
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2025-07-11
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en
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Abstract
Much has been written in the literature about the function and behaviour of the
Dutch impersonal passive. Recently Beliën (2016) argued that the function of
the impersonal passive is to simply convey that an act has occurred. This paper
that provides support for this interpretation, while stating that it cannot account
for the relative frequency of telic and atelic verbs found in the construction. To
explain this frequency distribution, first, this paper will show that many telic
predicates can describe atelic activity event types (cf. Vendler, 1957) and
second, the paper will argue that telic readings of impersonal passives proposed
by van Schaik-Rădulescu (2011) behave in a similar way to activity event types
in impersonal passives. The paper concludes by hypothesising that Dutch
impersonal passives lean toward an activity event reading and that the
acceptability of verbs is dependent on how easily a verbs fits this reading.
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Faculteit der Letteren