passive vs. inchoative

[George Aaron Broadwell]

Dear Fatemeh,

One avenue you might pursue is the Aktionsart of the verbs involved.  So I
think that in English, "become" does not normally occur with a verb that is
in the Achievement class.

It seems to me that the following judgments show that we get passives, but
not inchoatives, of verbs liked 'snap' and 'notice':

John noticed the poster.
The poster was noticed (by John)
??The poster became noticed.

Mary snapped the beans.
The beans were snapped (by Mary)
??The beans became snapped.

There are a few Google examples of "became snapped"  and "became noticed",
but they seem odd to me.  I wonder if other English speakers agree...

If this is correct for English, you might check to see if verbs of all
aspectual classes occur with Sod.

Thanks,
Aaron Broadwell

On Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 2:06 PM, Fatemeh Nemati <fatemene at gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> How one can tell an inchoative verb  from a passive verb? I am not clear as
> to how one can argue for the existence of passive constructions in a
> language and how it can be distinguished from inchoative verbs and cases of
> decausation. Some researchers on Persian claim that there is no passive in
> Persian and they try to explain the cases of passivization (passive based on
> my conclusion from the data claimed by the scholars to be passive in
> English) by claiming that they are intransitive complex predicates: the
> difference between passive/active is attributed to transitivity and they are
> analyzed transitive/causative vs intransitive/inchoative:
>
> 1.rAmin   xAne    sAxt
>    Ramin  house   built         Ramin built a house.   ==> Active,
> transitive
>
> 2.xAne      sAxt-e                                    Sod
>    house     built-Past.participle.suffix         became  The house was
> built.
> ==> (passive which is claimed to be) intransitive, the past participle and
> verb is as well claimed to make up the complex predicate, of  Adj+V
> sequence.
> This argument is said to be supported by the existence of complex
> predicates with kardan/Sodan alternation:
>
> 3. AryA rAmin rA    majruh kard
> Arya  Ramin OM wounded do  lit."Arya wounded Ramin." ==> active,
> causative, transitive complex predicate
>
> 4. Arya majruh Sod
> Arya wounded became       lit. "Arya became wounded." ==> intransitive
> complex predicate
>
>  I regard 2 and 4 as cases of passivization, in which the agent argument
> functioning as the subject is suppressed and theme argument now functions as
> the Subject. The only difference between 2 and 4 is that in 2 there is a
> morphological rule that changes the active verb to a passive by changing the
> verb to its past participle and it is accompanied then with an inflected
> form of Sod-an (the auxiliary used to make passives). In 4, the light verb
> (kard) is simply substituted by the passive auxiliary "Sod-an".
>
> Since the passive auxiliary also is homophonous and in some cases has an
> overlap in meaning with the syntactic inchoative constructions Adj + Sod (5
> below), passive constructions are all analyzed to be inchoative complex
> predicates and when the light verb is "kard-an" in a complex predicate,
> there is an inchoative/causative alternation. As such 3 and 4 will be
> regarded as inchoative/causative alternation.
>
> 5. hava garm Sod
>  weather hot  became    "The weather became hot" ==> inchoative with a
> change of state meaning.
>
> It follows then that all passive constructions are taken to signify a
> change of state with the semantic head [BECOME].
> Now my question is how to argue that transitivity and passivity are two
> different notions (if they are) and how one can distinguish inchoatives from
> passives.
>
> I really appreciate your kind reply.
>
> All the best,
> Fatemeh
>
>
>


-- 
George Aaron Broadwell
Dept of Anthropology
UAlbany SUNY | Albany NY 12222
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