The Role of Information Structure in the Process of Learning the Passive Voice

Abstract

Learning the passive voice involves becoming acquainted with a number of partial grammatical issues, which alone makes it a complex task for native speakers but especially for foreign language learners. One other difficulty is caused by the fact that passive structures can be used only on certain conditions, that is mostly when the subject (patient) of the passive sentence is what is given and the complement (agent) appears as a new element of the sentence. In the context of foreign language learning it must be emphasized that the means for encoding information structure does not correlate (or only appears to correlate, as in Polish in relation to German) across languages. In other words, each language community has their own preferences as to how to structure discourse. It can thus be assumed that the German language learner will have difficulty recognizing and using proper information structures both in the process of understanding and producing passive sentences, and that the influence of context may play a crucial role in that process.