The pseudopassive: Not so phoney after all, SOAS University of London
Channel: SOAS University of London
Date: 2017-02-10

https://www.soas.ac.uk/linguistics
You can find out more about this event at https://goo.gl/wfAi8o

The pseudopassive is a passive where the subject corresponds, in the active, to the object of a preposition, rather than the object of a verb:

(1) a. Logan is relied on (by us all).

     b. This pen has been written with (by somebody famous).

This construction has been seen as a defective kind of passive: firstly, the subject is promoted from inside a dependent of the verb, and secondly, it can be promoted out of what looks like an adjunct (as in (1b)). Usually the passive is thought of as an argument alternation, and one which targets the whole dependent, not just some subpart of it. What is more, this kind of prepositional passive is typologically very rare, only being attested in about half a dozen languages.

All these factors lead to the name pseudopassive, implying a less than authentic status. However, in this talk I argue that such differences as there are are superficial, and that, upon closer inspection, the pseudopassive actually turns out to be only minimally different from the regular passive. It is subject, for example, to the same semantic-pragmatic constraints, which are more important than any putative syntactic differences between the two kinds of passive. And the idea of a clear-cut distinction between arguments and adjuncts is already so difficult to maintain that the fact the pseudopassive seems to trouble it even further shouldn't be seen as cause for concern.

I give an analysis in the framework of Lexical Functional Grammar, showing that the account of the regular passive need only be minimally modified to incorporate the prepositional passive as well, and that we do not require two separate accounts of the two kinds of passive, nor a new, separate operation of reanalysis, as previous works have suggested.

About the speaker
Jamie Findlay is a DPhil student at the University of Oxford, where he also completed his BA (in French and linguistics) and MPhil (in linguistics). He is working primarily on formal issues relating to multiword expressions and their representation in the lexicon, but is also interested in sociolinguistics and critical discourse analysis, especially relating to sexuality and gender.