Passives and evidentiality: Danish reportive passives and their equivalents in German

Abstract

In Danish, passivized utterance and cognition verbs allow a particular construction where the subject of the passive verb is the semantic subject of the embedded predicate: præsidenten formodes at være flygtet (‘the president is assumed to have flown’). This use of utterance and cognition verbs with a “raised” subject can be seen as an evidentiality strategy since the embedded proposition is attributed to a source external to the speaker (hearsay), hence the term “reportive passive”. Reportive passives of this kind are completely absent in German. The article provides a discussion of the syntax and semantics of reportive passives in Danish arguing that it is a regular (compositional) passive formation and that no separate construction (with an idiosyncratic semantics) is needed to account for the observed properties. On the basis of the mulitilingual corpus Europarl, four different strategies to rendering reportive passives in German are identified. These strategies are discussed and illustrated with authentic examples, and their advantages and disadvantages in conveying the semantics and the information structure of the Danish reportive passives are pointed out.