22.3026, Qs: Passives, Implicit Agents

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LINGUIST List: Vol-22-3026. Tue Jul 26 2011. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 22.3026, Qs: Passives, Implicit Agents

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1)
Date: 26-Jul-2011
From: Andrew McIntyre [andrew.mcintyre at unine.ch]
Subject: Passives, Implicit Agents
 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Tue, 26 Jul 2011 16:21:03
From: Andrew McIntyre [andrew.mcintyre at unine.ch]
Subject: Passives, Implicit Agents

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Dear linguists,
A common claim is that verbal passives disfavor interpretations in which 
implicit Agents are interpreted as co-referent with passive subjects. 
Thus, (1) does not suggest that Mary is dressing herself (the "disjoint 
reference" effect). By contrast, coreferent interpretations are allowed 
with adjectival participles like those in (2) and certain get-constructions 
like (3).

(1) Mary is being dressed at the moment.
(2) Mary seems well-dressed. Mary is a well-dressed person.
(3) Mary is getting dressed.

I would be grateful if people could help me with the following questions:

A. Does anyone know of discussions in the literature of cases of 
adjectival participles which disfavor coreferent interpretations? It 
appears that such cases are possible once we move beyond verbs like 
"dress" which express commonly self-directed acts. For instance, my 
judgment of (4) is that "underrated" cannot have a coreferent reading 
however much the context favors it. 

(4)	 #If I had the choice between people who think they are geniuses 
and people who underrate themselves, I would choose the underrated 
ones.

B. Can anyone provide me with defenses (or criticisms) of PRAGMATIC 
accounts of the lack of coreferent interpretations in cases like (1). An 
example of such an account might be one which treats disjoint 
reference effects as an implicature (say a scalar implicature based on 
the fact that the speaker could have signaled the reflexive 
interpretation unambiguously by using an active construction with a 
reflexive interpretation such as ''Mary is dressing.''). Examples of non-
pragmatic accounts would be ones which make no appeal to 
implicatures and rely on absolute syntactic/semantic statements 
("coreference is out with verbal passives since it would incur a 
crossover violation"; cf. Baker/Johnson/Roberts, Passive Arguments 
Raised, Linguistic Inquiry, 1989).

Many thanks in advance for any help in these matters.

Andrew 

Linguistic Field(s): Pragmatics
                     Semantics
                     Syntax







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