Passives in Swedish academic texts. A contrastive analysis of Polish and Scandinavian students' academic writing

Academic writing is typically characterized by excessive use of impersonal constructions and passive voice as a means of achieving a more objective presentation. Languages differ both in respect of the types of impersonal and passive constructions they apply and the scope of their use. While Polish stylistics favours passives and impersonals, Swedish is known for preferring the use of the active voice.

Mainland Scandinavian languages have two means of expressing the passive voice: morphological, the so-called s-passiv and periphrastic bli-passiv. Both have a full inflectional paradigm in all tenses in Swedish. They are not fully interchangeable and factors such as animacy of the subject and aspectual value of the verb influence the choice of the passive form.

In this paper we investigate the use of passive voice by Polish students of Swedish in their academic writing and compare it with that of the native speakers. The material consists of 20 master’s theses in linguistics, 10 in each language. In the study we use both quantitative and qualitative analysis of the data. The preliminary findings indicate that the Polish students use the passive more frequently, typically to compensate for the impersonal constructions they would have applied in Polish. They seem to be largely unaware of the distributional restrictions on passives in Swedish, where both passives are available in all tenses.