Title

Dr. Joseph Emonds

<jeemonds@sils.shoin.ac.jp>

Kobe-Shoin Women's University

English Indirect Passives

(1)        Her tonsillitis was (*being) severe.
             A back garden is (*being) expensive.

English progressive passives with inanimate subjects are always "verbal" rather than "adjectival." Thus, the examples (1) are verbal passives, and hence allow two options excluded with adjectival passives: agentive by-phrases (Wasow: 1977) and use of get instead of be as auxiliary. 

(2)        Her tonsillitis was { being/ getting } treated (by my doctor).
             A back garden is { being/ getting } laid out (by the owner).

Many researchers today recognize that have is a transitive counterpart to the intransitive copula be. (3) suggests that passives are no exception, though research rarely relates the construction in (3) to the be-passive. Note that get equally well replaces either auxiliary:

(3)        She was { having/ getting } her tonsillitis treated (by my doctor).
             We are { having/ getting } a back garden laid out (by the owner).

The surface subjects in (3) receive a "benefactive/ malefactive" theta role with respect to the action. Hence the term "indirect passive," since this type of interpretation characterizes Japanese "indirect passives" as well.

The construction in (3) conforms perfectly to Åfarli's (1992, 8) summary:  "...every sentence one might reasonably want to call a passive may be minimally characterized as follows:

(a)   Relative to its active counterpart, the passive sentence is marked with special verb morphology.
(b)   The subject of the active sentence never remains subject in the passive counterpart."

We can add (c), whereby the subject of an active can be an object of a P such as English by, French par "by" or de "of", or Japanese ni "to". As expected, the examples in (3) permit such PPs.

(c) Within a verbal passive predicate, the subject of an active can be realized in a PP.

My subject matter is the grammar of the construction in (3) and the theoretical implications of a descriptively adequate analysis. An unavoidable conclusion is that (2)-(3) demand unified treatment. They are all passives in the same sense: when certain "auxiliaries" combine with a given participle, characteristic syntactic changes must follow. I aim to show that an adequate analysis for traditional verbal passives has to equally well apply to and explain the construction in (3) which I call the "English indirect passive."