De passive ynfinityf as absintyf

Abstract

There exists a Frisian infinitive construction which has the remarkable property that it allows a passive interpretation, even though there are no explicit formal signs for such a reading. In de learaar is te skearen, literally ‘the teacher is to shave’, it can be the case that the teacher is actively shaving, but also that someone is shaving him. The construction can be identified as a so-called prepositional te-infinitve. One property of this type of infinitive is that it functions as an absentive, which means that the action as being performed in the complement (here the shaving) is taking place at a location remote from the place where the deictic centre of the utterance is situated. In this article, it is claimed that it is this property of absentiveness that makes the passive reading possible. However, not all languages that exhibit a grammatical absentive construction do show a passive interpretation. It is tentatively suggested that the modal infinitive construction, which is formally fairly similar and which, moreover, is inherently passive, might have functioned as a stepping stone for the Frisian variant of the absentive construction to develop its possibility of a passive reading.