How much bekommen is there in the German bekommen passive?

We present an experiment and a corpus study jointly examining possible semantic constraints on the formation of the bekommen passive in German. In particular, we address the question of whether the recipient role that the lexical verb bekommen (‘get’) assigns to its external argument still constrains the formation of the bekommen passive. We capture this potential restriction in the Recipient Constraint. Our data show a split between verbs whose dative object is not a recipient – many of them are perfectly acceptable in the bekommen passive, but some are not. We conclude that the Recipient Constraint does not hold, but the formation of the bekommen passive is still sensitive to semantic properties of the main verb use of bekommen.

• Affiliations: 1: Goethe University Frankfurt; 2: University of Potsdam