Функції пасивних конструкцій в українській та німецькій мовах
Functions of passive constructions in Ukrainian and German

Summary/Abstract: The article deals with passive constructions in Ukrainian and German languages, theirmanifestation in formal syntactic and semantic structures of a sentence, researches approachesto determining the place and functions of the passive voice in texts; provides contrastiveanalysis of clausal topic assignment, impersonalization and detransitivation in passive constructionsof various types as exemplifi ed by the material of modern fi ction. The articlealso describes and illustrates reasons behind an agent defocusing, proves that agent reductionand detransitivation are common features for both languages. Although clausal topicassignment is considered to be the most important function of passive voice in German,its role in Ukrainian is rather dull in comparison, which is in part caused by diff erentsyntactic organization of languages under research.

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