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  1. #11
    Philologist Senior Member ajaxfetish's Avatar
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    Default Re: German Question

    Quote Originally Posted by Centurio Nixalsverdrus View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by ajaxfetish
    My German text has the example sentence Ein neues Ausländergesetz hat eingeführt werden müssen (is this a mistake?).
    A new immigration law had to be passed. No this is no mistake. It is, however, bad style, and it sounds very much like southern German to me. Better would be Ein neues Ausländergesetz musste eingeführt werden. Why you would need to employ Perfekt in that context, even in a spoken conversation, is beyond my understanding (as not being from southern Germany, but Bavarians might have a different opinion). Your textbook example suggests perfective - passive - modal.

    Quote Originally Posted by Ser Clegane
    Der Euro wird eingeführt worden sein müssen.
    Ser Clegane's example suggests future - perfective - passive - modal, while the perfective part is there because his sentence is in Futur II if I'm not mistaken.
    Precisely. I'm trying to combine the Futur II (future perfect) with passive and a modal, as these seem to be the main four paraphrastic constructions in German (there's also a paraphrastic subjunctive, the Konjunktiv II, but all the auxiliaries have subjunctive forms, so they don't need to go the paraphrastic route with würden, and I don't think I can combine that with the others). If it's impossible to use all four auxiliary verb constructions simultaneously, I'd deal with it, but it would be unlikely that they couldn't be combined and it looks like they can, even if the result is ridiculously dense. I'm just trying to find a consistent hierarchy between them, which is proving elusive.

    Quote Originally Posted by Centurio Nixalsverdrus
    Quote Originally Posted by ajaxfetish
    Er sagte, dass der Euro eingeführt worden sein müssen werde
    No, you got to change the word order.

    Er sagte, der Euro werde eingeführt worden sein müssen.
    Wow, I can't believe it, but this is really correct!
    So, you can combine all four auxiliaries, but you can't do so in a subordinate clause? (one with dass, or ob, or weil, or what have you, and all the verbs arrayed at the end). That seems improbable to me. Are you sure?

    One more question: you said the perfect passive modal construction from the textbook sounded both clunky and southern. If we put the verbs in the same order as Ser Clegane's example that was also future tense, does it come out the same, or better, or ungrammatical?

    textbook: Ein neues Ausländergesetz hat eingeführt werden müssen
    reordered: Ein neues Ausländergesetz muß eingeführt worden sein

    Ajax
    Last edited by ajaxfetish; 08-02-2010 at 05:41.

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