Pseudo-passive

Pseudo-passive is a grammatical category that describes the relationship between the action and the participants identified by its argument to their thematic relations. It is common in spoken English. Thus, when the subject is the patient, target or undergoer of the action, it is said to be in the passive voice.

However, as a voice of the passivization only occurs when the PATIENT (or other objects of a grammatical encoding in general) is mapped to SUBJECT in lexical mapping from OBJECT of a grammatical encoding, the pseudo-passives are called false passives.

Contents

Form

The pseudo-passive is formed with have or get + an object + the participle of the verb[1]

Examples

Ancient Egyptians had their cats respected.
Do Asians have their cows respected today?

Generatives

As it is assumed (incorrectly) as the transformation of subject and object relations of arguments in passivized thematic relations, the descriptiveness of pseudo-passive in TG is out of context as to its theta role.

It is shown that the direct object position in this construction is restricted to NPs that lack Deep structure level projections. As a result, the direct object can only receive a non-specific interpretation, resists certain types of modification, extraction, and scope interactions

For the majority of linguists the determining factor in TG is transitivity; claiming that if a clause is transitive it can be passivized.[2] Accordingly, if passive voice is chosen, the person or thing becomes an affected participant of the action (theme). And that the passive constructions have the following characteristics:

a) the subject of the passive clause is a direct object in the corresponding active clause
b) the subject of the active clause is expressed in the form of an agentive or agentive adjunct

For some linguists stative passives qualify as passive only if the passive is defined either in terms of the semantic role of the subject. However, the ambiguity is manifested in copula "be" as being the polysemy of corresponding of adjectives (past participle).

References

  1. ^ Carter, R., McCarthy, M. 2006, Cambridge Grammar of English, Cambridge University Press, pp. 778-797.
  2. ^ Matthews, P.H. 2007, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics, 2nd edn, Oxford University Press.