Passive constructions in the “Corpus of Students’ Essays” Cover Image

Ciešamās kārtas konstrukcijas „Skolēnu pārspriedumu korpusā”
Passive constructions in the “Corpus of Students’ Essays”

Author(s): Kristine Levane-Petrova
Subject(s): Syntax, Baltic Languages
Published by: Latvijas Universitātes Akadēmiskais apgāds
Keywords: voice; passive voice; dynamic passive; stative passive; theme; rheme; subject; specialized corpus;

Summary/Abstract: The category of voice and especially the passive voice is always a topic of great interest among the researchers of various persuasions. Latvian is not an exception. Thus far, the category of voice, the passive voice and the related phenomena have been described in different Latvian grammars, many aspects of the voice have also been analysed by different researchers in the individual studies. Although the Latvian language has many descriptions and studies on the passive voice, the types of the passive of the Latvian language have not been examined until now. Therefore, this paper will analyse the passive constructions, types of passive and related aspects of the passive voice in the “Corpus of Students’ Essays”. This is a specialized corpus that contains 468 students’ essays from the 12th grade Latvian language exam (http://nosketch.korpuss.lv/#dashboard?corpname=vidusskolu_diktati). The first part of the article deals with the brief description of the passive voice in Latvian: the types of passive constructions, an agent, the formation of passive voice constructions, and other phenomena related to the passive voice. The second part of the article analyses the dynamic passive constructions, while the third part of the article scrutinises the stative passive constructions in the specialized corpus. Both dynamic and stative passive analysis considers the distribution of passive forms, passive types, word order in passive constructions, passive constructions and the agent. This work has received financial support from the Latvian Council of Science under the grant agreement No. lzp-2018/1-0527 (“Development of Learner Corpus of Latvian: methods, tools and applications”) in synergy with the Latvian State Research Programme “Latvian Language”, agreement No. VPP-IZM-2018/2-0002 (subproject “Acquisition of Latvian Language”).

  • Issue Year: 2021
  • Issue No: 12
  • Page Range: 127-141
  • Page Count: 15
  • Language: Latvian
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