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Todorova, M. et al. (2000). Aspectual Coercion and the Online Computation of Sentential Aspect. In Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 3-8). Cognitive Science Society. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Aspectual-Coercion-and-the-Online-Computa-tion-of-Todorova-Straub/4d362606faec7b68d22bae28299e444189bb5c12

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• 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.