A number of theoretical approaches predicts that every transitive verb that can be reflexivized and passivized can enter the formation of the Passive of Reflexive (PoR) in German. Others have claimed that the construction is restricted to inherently and naturally reflexive verbs. Based on the sdeWaC, a large web corpus for German that has been automatically annotated with syntactic relations, we identified 134 verbs that enter the formation of the PoR. From the same corpus, we extracted proportions of reflexive uses for transitive verbs in general. We find that occurrences of PoR verbs are strongly correlated with a large proportion of reflexive uses in the corpus. This result favors the hypothesis that the PoR is available only for inherently and naturally reflexive verbs.
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