Alternation ‘man’ (Coded)

In this construction (common to other Germanic languages, e.g. German or Dutch), the S/A of active verbs is substituted by the indefinite pronoun man/mon. In this respect, the S/A becomes irrelevant and for this reason is seen as downgraded by many scholars, who consider it a particular passive construction (e.g. Quirk & Wrenn 1960: 81; Vezzosi 1998). However, I argue that it should be considered and analysed separately from the Old English periphrastic passive. As a matter of fact, despite behaving semantically as a passive, from the point of view of morphology and syntax it is an active form. In spite of accounting for it among the passive constructions, Vezzosi (1998: 60-61) points to a different degree of control and transitivity between the different passive constructions: the mon-construction implies “an implicit human agent (that needn't naming fully or referring to explicitly)”, which is not there in periphrastic passives, where -on the other hand- “only the resulting state of the patient is focused on”.