In this chapter, we present first some general characteristics of the
passive and then a movement analysis of it. Although superficially the
passive does not resemble subject raising, our analysis of it makes the two
constructions analogous in certain respects. Moreover, as we will show,
subject raising turns out to be analogous not just to the passive of simple
clauses, but also to the passive of complex clauses containing ECM verbs.
All three phenomena (subject raising, passive of simple clauses, passive of
ECM verbs) turn out to obey a correlation called
Burzio's generalization, according
to which verbs without an agent argument also lack the ability to assign
case to their complements. In a final section, we show that there are two
types of case, structural and inherent, and that Burzio's generalization
holds only for structural case.
Characteristics of the passive
In English, as in most other languages, active sentences like (1a)
have passive counterparts like (1b).
| (1) | a. | Active | Nancy | approved | them. | ||
| Thematic roles | Agent | Patient | |||||
| Grammatical functions | Subject | Direct object | |||||
| b. | Passive | They | were approved | (by | Nancy). | ||
| Thematic roles | Patient | (Agent) | |||||
| Grammatical functions | Subject | (Object of preposition) | |||||
Passivization has a number of effects. First and foremost, the agent argument, which is expressed as the subject of the active sentence, is demoted in the passive to an optional by phrase Second, the patient argument is promoted from object to subject. In other words, the agent and patient arguments are linked to different grammatical functions in the passive than in the active. Third, a past participle in the passive, unlike one in the active, can't assign case in English.
| (2) | a. | Active | Nancy has approved them. | |
| b. | Passive | * | Itexpl was approved them. | |
| Intended meaning: 'They were approved.' | ||||
In English, the passive is expressed analytically by a combination of the past participle and a form of the auxiliary verb be. Other languages allow the passive to be expressed synthetically, as illustrated in (3) for Korean and in (4) for Latin.
| (3) | a. | Active | Chulswu-ka kyehoyk-ul helak- ha- yessta. Chulswu nom plans acc approve active past Agent Patient Subject Direct object 'Chulswu approved the plans.' | |
| b. | Passive | Kyehoyk-i (chulswu-eyuyhaye) helak- toy- essta. plans nom Chulswu by approve passive past Patient (Agent) Subject (Object of postposition) 'The plans were approved (by Chulswu).' | ||
| (4) | a. | Active | Puer-0 claud-it port-am. boy nom close 3.sg.pres door acc Agent Patient Subject Direct object 'The boy is closing the door.' | |
| b. | Passive | Port-a claud-it- ur (a puer-o). door nom close 3.sg.pres passive by boy abl Patient (Agent) Subject (Object of preposition) 'The door is being closed (by the boy).' |
In these languages, it is the bound morphemes -toy- and -ur that result in the effects of passivization mentioned above. As in English, the grammatical functions of the agent and patient arguments differ in the active and the passive. Also, as in English, the passive verb form cannot assign the case that is assigned by its active counterpart.
| (5) | a. | * | Kyehoyk-ul (chulswu-eyuyhaye) helak- toy- essta. plans acc Chulswu by approve passive past Intended meaning: 'The plans were approved (by Chulswu).' | |
| b. | * | Claud-it- ur port-am (a puer-o). close 3.sg.pres passive door acc by boy abl Intended meaning: 'The door is being closed by the boy.' |
Returning to English, the properties of the passive participle suggest that it is not a verb, but rather a deverbal adjective (that is, an adjective that is morphologically derived from a verb). Since adjectives in English don't assign case (recall Exercise 5.3, Part D), this immediately accounts for the inability of the passive participle to do so in (2b). The idea that passive participles are adjectives seems to run into difficulties, though, in connection with aspectual semantics. Aspect is a complex linguistic category having to do with the kinds of situations that verbs and verb phrases can denote, but for present purposes, we need to distinguish only two such situations: events and states. In English, a convenient diagnostic is that events, but not states, can appear in the progressive.
| (6) | a. | Eventive | Non-progressive | The police arrested many demonstrators. | |
| b. | Progressive | The police are arresting many demonstrators. | |||
| (7) | a. | Stative | Non-progressive | He knows the address. | |
| b. | Progressive | * | He is knowing the address. |
Passive participles can be used to denote events, as in the passive counterparts of (6) that are given in (8), whereas adjectives in English are generally stative, as shown in (9).
| (8) | a. | Eventive | Non-progressive | Many demonstrators were arrested (by the police). | |
| b. | Progressive | Many demonstrators were being arrested (by the police). | |||
| (9) | a. | Stative | Non-progressive | She is tall; scholarships are available. | |
| b. | Progressive | * | She is being tall; scholarships are being available. |
The aspectual contrast between (8) and (9) therefore seems to raise a difficulty for the idea that participles are adjectives. However, it is possible (though rare) for adjectives in English to be eventive. This is shown by (10a), which is synonymous with (10b); note that early and late are adjectives in (10a) and adverbs in (10b).
| (10) | a. | They were | |
| b. | They arrived |
As expected, eventive adjectives like early and late can also appear in connection with the progressive; cf. the acceptability of both (11a) and (11b).
| (11) | a. | They are being | |
| b. | They are arriving |
Given the existence of eventive adjectives, then, the eventive aspectual semantics of the participles in (8) turns out to be unproblematic.
In addition to the eventive aspectual semantics just discussed, passive participles can also have stative aspectual semantics, as illustrated by the aspectual contrast in (12).
| (12) | Aspect | Example | Discourse context | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| a. | Event | The door is locked (by the janitor). | The janitor locks the door at exactly 5 p.m. without fail. | |||
| b. | State | The door is locked. | It's now 5:15 p.m. | |||
Notice that, as one would expect, stative participles cannot occur in the progressive.
| (13) | Aspect | Example | Discourse context | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| a. | Event | The door is being locked. | The janitor always locks the door at exactly | |||
| b. | State | * | The door is being locked. | It's now 5:15 p.m. | ||
Finally, passive participles can go so far as to lose their verbal properties completely. They can then appear in the comparative and superlative like ordinary gradable adjectives, and they can form un- adjectives, as shown in (14).
| (14) | a. | She's more | |
| b. | uncommitted, uneducated, unenlightened, uninterested, unsatisfied |
| (15) | a. | Let's take advantage of the situation. | |
| b. | They are making some headway on a solution. | ||
| c. | They will | ||
| d. | The Prime Minister paid homage to the dead. | ||
| e. | She took note of what I said. | ||
| f. | The government keeps tabs on his operations. |
The restriction of object idiom chunks to the complement position of the licensing verb is thrown into striking relief by the contrast between nearly synonymous expressions such as attention and heed, or progress and headway (Radford 1988:423). The variants with the ordinary expressions (attention, progress) are fine, but those with the idiom chunks (heed, headway) are not because they are not licensed by the verbs in red.
| (16) | a. | He's always trying to attract my
| |
| b. | He's a child who requires a lot of
| ||
| (17) | a. | Please be prepared to report some
| |
| b. | We appreciate your |
Not surprisingly given their licensing requirements, object idiom chunks are generally ungrammatical in subject position.
| (18) | a. | ||
| b. | More | ||
| c. |
However, object idiom chunks are able to occur in subject position under one condition---in passive sentences in which the passive participle is that of the licensing verb. This is illustrated by the contrast between (19) and (20) (Radford 1988:423).
| (19) | a. | Little advantage was taken of the situation. | |
| b. | Some headway is being made on a solution. | ||
| c. | Little heed was paid to her proposal. | ||
| d. | Due homage was paid to the dead. | ||
| e. | Little note was taken of what I said. | ||
| f. | Close tabs were kept on his operations. | ||
| (20) | a. | * | My heed was attracted immediately. |
| b. | * | Your close heed is required. | |
| c. | * | A bit of headway was reported at the meeting. | |
| d. | * | Our headway in solving the problem wasn't sufficiently appreciated. |
As we have just seen, object idiom chunks in the active are locally licensed by a licensing verb in a government relation, and this relationship is extended in passive sentences. Although the licensing relationship differs in both cases (spec-head for subject raising, government for passive), the passive is analogous to subject raising in that both constructions involve the extension of a local licensing relationship. Because of this fundamental similarity, we will treat the passive as a further instance of movement.
Our movement analysis of the passive is based on the premise that
patient arguments originate in the same structural position in both the
active and the passive. This means that the elementary trees for active
and passive participles both contain a complement position. However, the
elementary trees for the two categories also differ in several ways.
First, as discussed earlier, passive participles are adjectives. Second,
in the active, the agent argument is obligatorily linked to (=
expressed in) Spec(VP), whereas in the passive, it is optionally linked to
an adjunct by phrase. We will represent this by omitting Spec(VP)
in the elementary tree for the passive participle. Finally, passive
participles in English cannot assign oblique case; recall the
ungrammaticality of (2b). The elementary trees we propose for active and
passive participles are thus as shown in (21).
| (21) | a. |
| b. |
| |||
| Active: [ + obl ] | Passive: [ - obl ] | ||||||
The following correlation is worth noticing. Active verbs, including active participles, link their agent argument to the specifier position and are able to assign oblique case. On the other hand, passive participles have neither property. This correlation between the linking of a head's agent argument to its specifier position and the head's ability to assign oblique case is known as Burzio's generalization (Burzio 1986).
In what follows, we illustrate the derivation of a passive sentence like (22).
| (22) | The proposal was adopted. |
First, let's substitute the patient argument the proposal in the elementary tree in (21b). This yields (23a). We then substitute (23a) as the complement of the passive auxiliary verb was, as in (23b). For simplicity, we will assume that auxiliary verbs, like raising verbs and passive participles, lack a specifier position. The resulting structure then substitutes as the complement of I, as in (23c).
| (23) | a. | 
| b. | 
| c. | 
| |||||
| Substitute patient argument in (21b) | Substitute (23a) as complement of passive auxiliary | Substitute (23b) as complement of I | |||||||||
Because of the inability of the passive participle to assign oblique case, the patient argument cannot receive case in the complement position in a structure like (23b). Since every noun phrase needs case, the patient argument must move to the closest position to which case is assigned. This position is Spec(IP), where the patient argument receives nominative case. The resulting final structure is shown in (24). (For simplicity, we don't show the verb raising of is from V to I.)
| (24) | 
|
According to the analysis just presented, the passive is analogous to subject raising in the following way. In both cases, a noun phrase (the subject of the complement clause with subject raising, the object with passive) originates in a position to which case can't be assigned. The requirement that noun phrases receive case then forces the relevant noun phrase (complement subject, object) to move to the closest position to which case is assigned. Of course, subject raising and the passive aren't identical in every respect. There are two important differences between the two instances of movement. First, consider the path between the head of the chain and its tail in both cases. This path contains a clause boundary (IP) in the case of subject raising, but not in the case of the passive.
| The term head has two completely different meanings---don't confuse them. The head of an X' structure is the syntactic category that immediately dominates a word or morpheme and projects an intermediate and a maximal projection. The head of a movement chain is simply the highest element in the chain. In the case of verb movement, the head in the chain sense happens to be a head in the X' sense. But in the cases under discussion here, the head of the chain is a maximal projection. |
| (25) | a. | 
| b. | 
| |||
| Subject raising | Passive | ||||||
Second, as we noted earlier, passive changes the grammatical function
of the moved noun phrase. In subject raising, on the other hand, the
grammatical function of the moved noun phrase doesn't change; it is always
a subject.
In this section, we focus on the passive of ECM verbs like
expect that we introduced in connection with mediated case
assignment in
The passive and nonfinite complementation
| (26) | a. | Your folks expect you to call. | |
| b. | You are expected to call. |
The elementary tree for expect in (26a) is given in (27a). In accordance with the previous discussion, the elementary tree for the passive participle expected is as in (27b). The difference between the two trees is analogous to that between the trees in (21); the only difference is the syntactic category of the complement (DP in the case of ordinary verbs, IP in the case of ECM verbs). We draw your attention to the fact that the elementary tree in (27b) is missing a specifier position; in accordance with Burzio's generalization, it also lacks the ability to assign oblique case.
| (27) | a. | 
| b. | 
| |||
| Active: [ + obl ] | Passive: [ - obl ] | ||||||
In what follows, we illustrate the derivation of (26b). The derivation of the complement clause is shown in (28); note that the complement subject undergoes subject movement from Spec(VP) to Spec(IP) to provide the complement clause with a subject.
| (28) | a. | 
| b. | 
| c. | 
| |||||
| Structure of complement VP | Substitute (28a) as complement of nonfinite I | Move subject of complement clause | |||||||||
The subsequent steps of the derivation involving the matrix clause are as shown in (29).
| (29) | a. | 
| b. | 
| c. | 
| |||||
| Substitute (28c) as complement of passive participle of ECM verb | Substitute (29a) as complement of passive auxiliary | Substitute (29b) as complement of matrix I | |||||||||
In (29c), the subject of the complement clause cannot be assigned case by the participle of the ECM verb because the participle, being passive, lacks the ability to assign case. Therefore, the complement subject must move to the nearest position to which case is assigned---the matrix Spec(IP), which is assigned nominative case. The resulting structure is shown in (30).
| (30) | 
|
Consider now the chain headed by you in (30). The chain
consists of three links, which occupy the matrix Spec(IP), the complement
Spec(IP), and the complement Spec(VP). Recall from
| (31) | a. | 
| b. | 
| |||
| ECM passive chain | Raising chain | ||||||
Why are the chains in (31) analogous? The reason is that the passive participle of the ECM verb and the subject raising verb share the following two properties. As shown in (32), both heads fail to project position, and they are both unable to assign case. In other words, both heads obey Burzio's generalization.
| (32) | a. |
| b. | 
| |||
| [ - obl ] | [ - obl ] | ||||||
Although Burzio's generalization itself remains to be explained, it does allow us to understand the ungrammaticality of all three sentences in (33) as stemming from a single source. In all three sentences, the head (highlighted in italics), fails to be associated with an agent and hence fails to project Spec(VP), yet contrary to Burzio's generalization assigns case to the underlined noun phrases, either by mediated case assignment (33a,b) or under government (33c). (We are assuming that expletive it in (33) would substitute into Spec(IP), not Spec(VP).)
| (33) | a. | * | Itexpl seems |
| b. | * | Itexpl is expected | |
| c. | * | Itexpl was approved them. |
For instance, the following German examples show that the active participle unterstützt 'supported' assigns accusative case, but that the homonymous passive participle cannot. Instead, in the passive, the patient argument is assigned nominative case by finite I (a silent [pres] element), as in English. (The following examples are all given in the form of subordinate clauses in order to abstract away from an irrelevant word order effect in German main clause that we discuss in a later chapter.)
| (34) | Active: | dass wir dies-en Kandidat-en unterstützt haben that we this acc candidate acc supported have 'that we have supported this candidate' | ||
| (35) | a. | Passive: | dass dies-er Kandidat- 0 unterstützt wurde that this nom candidate nom supported was 'that this candidate was supported' | |
| b. | * | dass dies-en Kandidat- en unterstützt wurde that this acc candidate acc supported was |
In contrast to verbs that govern the accusative, however, verbs that govern the dative continue to assign that case even in the passive. This is shown in (36) and (37).
| (36) | Active: | dass wir dies-em Kandidat- en geholfen haben that we this dat candidate dat helped have 'that we helped this candidate' | ||
| (37) | a. | Passive: | * | dass dies-er Kandidat- 0 geholfen wurde that this nom candidate nom helped was Intended meaning: 'that this candidate was helped' |
| b. | ok | dass dies-em Kandidat -en geholfen wurde that this dat candidate dat helped was |
The accusative and the dative are both assigned under government by the verbs unterstützen and helfen, respectively, but they differ in that the accusative alternates with the nominative, whereas the dative doesn't. What we mean by 'alternate' is simply that the argument that is assigned accusative case in the active is assigned nominative case in the passive. In the case of the dative, on the other hand, the argument that is assigned dative case in the active continues to be assigned dative in the passive. The alternating cases (nominative, accusative) are referred to as structural cases, whereas the nonalternating case (dative) is referred to as an inherent case.
The distinction between structural and inherent case has consequences for the proper formulation of Burzio's generalization. In view of the facts just presented, it holds only for verbs that assign structural case.
An important question that arises in connection with (37b) is what element nominative case is assigned to. It is generally assumed that German has an silent expletive element, corresponding to English expletive it or there, that is assigned nominative case in Spec(IP). The structure of (37b) is then as in (38). (As in English, we abstract away from raising the passive auxiliary---in this case, wurde---to the past tense I.)
| (38) | 
|
It is worth noting that the silent expletive bears a number feature with the default value 'singular'. Evidence for this comes from the number agreement pattern in (39): the overt plural subject in (39a) agrees with a plural verb form, whereas the silent expletive in (39b) agrees with the corresponding singular verb form.
| (39) | a. | dass die Kandidaten unterstützt | |
| b. | dass den Kandidaten geholfen |