The authors review different baselines for the study of alternant choices, emphasizing that normalization to a standard number of words – while straightforward in its application – will in many cases not provide a meaningful measure of frequency. Instead, it is argued, we need a baseline indicating opportunities of use, such as phrase or sentence counts. Exemplifying their proposal with reference to get- and be-passives and the presence or absence of agentive by-phrases, the authors demonstrate a sequence of measures taken to make the quantities that are compared more meaningful and defensible, based on linguistically informed selections of baseline quantities (number of main verbs, passives or potentially alternating passives). Crucially, this process must involve a categorization of observations by the researcher to ensure that mutual substitution is plausible in each case. To calibrate this manual data verification exercise to a manageable level, the authors apply a method of uneven category sub-sampling to the data, and use it to adjust variance estimates and confidence intervals in their analysis.

This chapter offers a detailed description of the formal properties of English passive constructions. Passive sentences are systematically related to active sentences. After reviewing core properties of the passive constructions in English, we discuss the major features of prior transformational analyses and the empirical problems that prevent them from capturing regularities, as well as peculiarities, of English passive constructions. To avoid analytical problems arising from transformational analyses, this chapter suggests a construction-based analysis of be-passives that leverages multiple grammatical properties, including those related to grammatical categories, grammatical functions, and semantic/pragmatic constraints. This analysis has been extended to the prepositional passive as well as get-passive constructions, both of which behave differently from the be-passive constructions. We see that the construction-based framework offers a way to account for relations of ‘family resemblance’ that unite seemingly divergent constructions.

In this chapter, we will discuss the core Voice alternations in Germanic languages. Different Voice alternations have in common that the argument structure of the underlying verb, in particular the semantic and syntactic properties of the verb’s external argument, are manipulated and this often goes along with changes in the morpho-syntax of the verb or the verbal phrase. In Section 1, we discuss inner-Germanic variation in the formation of analytic eventive and adjectival passives. In Section 2, we discuss the Mainland Scandinavian s-passives and in Section 3 we discuss noncanonical get-passives and related constructions. In Section 4, we turn to the morpho-syntactic variation in anticausative formation. Finally, in Section 5, we discuss how dispositional statements known as generic middles are realized across the Germanic languages.