Passives from Experiencer verbs

[Suzanne Kemmer]

There is an established construction {see/feel/find} + REFL  + 
participle
, with two subconstructions  containing present participle and past 
participle.

The most frequent collocates of reflexive pronouns in English are 
exactly
those three verbs, which almost always have following participles when 
occurring
with reflexives. (Michael Barlow wrote
about this in an analysis of English reflexives, but I can't remember 
where.)
The passive meaning Alan noticed basically comes from the past 
participle. The
V + REFL part is essentially a  quasi-paraphrase
of 'be' but with subject reflecting on the experience stated in
the complement.

On Dec 7, 2003, at 11:02 PM, Alan Jones wrote:

> I have nothing more on 'voir', but these notes have made me wonder 
> whether English doesn't have an extra periphrastic passive-type 
> construction, with experiencer verbs:
>
> (To her dismay) she saw herself eliminated in the last round.
>
> (To my horror) I found myself elected to the ethics committee.
>
> He felt himself borne up by the wave.
>
> Has this been recognised?
>
> Alan
>
>
>
> Dr Alan Jones,
> Department of Linguistics,
> Macquarie University,
> NSW 2109.
>
> Building W3A, Room 409.
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>>>> Paul Hopper <ph1u at ANDREW.CMU.EDU> 04/12/03 12:45 PM >>>
> 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