Form, Meaning and Aspect in the German Impersonal Passive

Michelle Leese's book is a must-read for those interested in the German impersonal passive. Based on an experimental study of almost 400 zero-argument passives she convincingly shows that this allegedly exceptional passive is the very core from which all werden-passives in their meaning as event-focused action are derived.

(Petra M. Vogel, Professor of German Linguistics, University of Siegen, Germany)

This book presents a vast amount of original data to confront a glaring weakness of the aspect analysis of the German passive: if the actional passive is telic, why is the impersonal passive of the type Es wurde getanzt atelic? The answer given is a revelation delightful in its simplicity.

(Dr Christopher Beedham, Honorary Lecturer, Department of German, University of St Andrews, Scotland)

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 out the 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.