Passives from Experiencer verbs

[Paul Hopper]

A further bibliographical note: On French se voir as a passive auxiliary 
for indirect objects see Glanville Price, The French Language Past and 
Present. Longman, 1971. A nice example is: "André Blanc, qui fut, jusqu'à 
sa mort en 1966, l'un des animateurs de l'architecture en France, se voit 
rendre un hommage tardif au Musée des Arts Décoratifs" (Price p. 236). It 
shows the degree to which se voir has become grammaticalized, for of course 
André Blanc, being dead, cannot exactly "see himself"! Presumably a test 
for whether a language "has" such passives would be precisely whether 
inanimate subjects are possible with ex-experiencer verbs.

BTW, perhaps this particular construction should be seen in the context of 
the proliferation of voir as a grammatical formative in French. The use of 
voir as an auxiliary is found in other functions also, such as the 
periphrastic substitute for a subjunctive ("Le Japon attend voir Moscou 
proposer un 'Plan Rapacki' pour l'Extre^me Orient" Price 250, cf. Le Japon 
attend que Moscou propose...). I think Knut Lambrecht discusses these and 
other uses of voir somewhere.

Paul Hopper

--On Thursday, December 4, 2003 12:23 AM +0100 Frederico Meinberg 
<frederico at MEINBERG.COM> wrote:

> Passives from Experiencer Verbs
>
> Dear Lingtyp colleagues,
>
> The French reflexive construction "se voir", 'to see
> oneself' can be used to promote an object to subject
> position in sentences of the form "se voir" + INF:
>
> (1) Les adolescents se voient	donner	  l?occasion
> d?améliorer leurs habiletés.
>     Teenagers	    REFL SEE.3P	give.INF  the opportunity to
> improve their abilities
>     'Teenagers are given the opportunity to improve their
> abilities'
>
> (2) Mariah Carey se voit     offrir	 une fortune pour
> quitter EMI!
>     M.	   C.	 REFL SEE.3P offer.INF	 a fortune to leave
> EMI!
>     "Mariah Carey is offered a fortune to leave EMI!"
>
> Some corpus work I did effectivelly shows that "se voir" is
> used for subject demotion in such cases, effectively
> functioning as a passive auxiliary for indirect objects.
> Direct objects can also be promoted through this way,
> though this is considerably less common.
>
> Such passives seem to be very rare from a typological point
> of view. An "Experiencer path" for the grammaticalization
> of passive morphology is absent from the standard
> discussion of the problem in Haspelmath (1990). Heine and
> Kuteva (2002:270) only mention a serial verb construction
> in Ancient Chinese, which does not involve reflexives.
>  Keenan (1985:260) has examples with "touch" and "suffer"
> from Thai and Vietnamese, and mentions that "passives of
> this sort are widely attested in languages spoken in
> Southeast Asia, including Mandarin, although their analysis
> as passives is in fact not obvious".
>
> I suppose that the French construction originated from a
> resultative construction of the form "se voir"+ PAST
> PARTICIPLE, which exists also in other Romance languages,
> but still, it would be important to know if verbs of
> experience --especially "see", but maybe also "hear" or
> "feel" can be at the origin of passive markers.
>
> Does anybody know any passive marker originating from one
> of those "Experiencer" verbs and how it may have been
> grammaticalized?
>
> Thank you very much,
>
> Frederico Meinberg
>
> References:
>
> Haspelmath, Martin. 1990. "The grammaticization of passive
> morphology". Studies in Language 14:1, 25-72.
>
> Heine, Bernd and Tania Kuteva. 2002. World lexicon of
> grammaticalization. Cambridge: CUP.
>
> Keenan, Edward. 1985. "Passive in the world's languages."
> In: Timothy Shopen (ed.), Language typology and syntactic
> description, vol. 1, Cambridge: CUP, 243-281.

---------------------------
Paul Hopper
Paul Mellon Distinguished Professor of the Humanities
Department of English
College of Humanities and Social Sciences
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA
Telephone (412) 268-7174
Fax (412) 268-7989