TITLE:
The German Impersonal Passive from the Perspective of Construction Grammar
AUTHORS:
Fang Guo
KEYWORDS:
Impersonal Passive, Construction Grammar, Passivization
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.14 No.6,
June
30,
2026
ABSTRACT: The passivization of verbs, particularly unaccusative verbs, within German impersonal passive constructions can be understood from a generative perspective as a fusion process between the syntactic construction and the verb itself. Through the metonymic mechanism in which “an entity stands for an action”, concrete events are recast as abstract activities. This shift is accompanied by a change in cognitive scanning mode, moving from sequential scanning to summary scanning. Agentivity is a necessary condition for the licensing of impersonal passives, but its content is multidimensional: it encompasses not only intentionality but also perceptibility and self-induced motion. Corpus analysis confirms that all verbs capable of forming impersonal passive constructions include an agentive argument that can be suppressed.