Become with Passive Voice

[Laurence Horn]

At 10:49 AM -0400 4/28/09, Baker, John wrote:
>         The passive voice usually requires the use of to be, or
>sometimes to get, as an auxiliary verb.  Can to become, or other
>auxiliary verbs, also be used?  Authoritative sources seem to differ, or
>perhaps I simply fail to understand them correctly.
>
P.S.  One large set of lexical adjectives with passive participle
morphology, that co-occur with both "become" and "come" are the
"unpassives":

The package (be)came unwrapped.
My trousers have (be)come unzipped.
The plan has (be)come untracked.

Which is not to say that "come" and "become" have the same
distribution with adjectival passives; the former really needs the
"un-" prefix, even when it's redundant:

The squid (be)came unfrozen/unthawed/thawed.
The squid became thawed/*came thawed.

The knot (be)came untied/unloosened/loose/loosened.
The knot came untied/unloosened/loose/*loosened.

But "become" as a general inchoative seems to do fine with all
change-of-state (or actually result-of-change-of-state) adjectives,
including participial ones.  But these are usually distinguished from
true verbal passive structures, which allow agents and such.

I don't know what the sources, authoritative and others, say, but I
imagine many of them say it with gusto.

LH

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