Passives from Experiencer verbs

[Daniel Everett]

On Monday, Dec 15, 2003, at 03:42 Europe/London, Paul Hopper wrote:

> It is worth bearing in mind that the French construction se voir + INF 
> noted by Frederico Meinberg that started this thread has an 
> infinitive, not a ppp. So we have neither a copula nor a passive 
> participle. Which raises the question of why we are calling it a 
> passive, other than the fact that the closest English translation 
> equivalent is with a passive.
>
> Regarding Dan's observation that we would expect the subject to have 
> actually experienced the event in question, there was that French 
> example from Glanville Price's book that I cited in which the subject 
> is explicitly said to have died, and so could not have witnessed the 
> event: "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). So it seems that 
> in French at least the construction does not require its subject to be 
> an experiencer.
>
> Paul
>



Paul asks, quite rightly, why we would call this construction a 
Passive, since it lacks the basic list of properties that, say, the 
English Passive would have, and suggests that perhaps this is merely 
because its closest English translation is a Passive. This is an 
important observation which many readers of this list will also have 
made as they followed the discussion.

I suspect that there is more to the label than the translation. 
Linguists often use a label ambiguously, to refer to its form or its 
function, as we all know. On the one hand, Passive can be a specific 
list of properties, or a formal definition, and a construction either 
has them, and is thus a Passive, or it does not, and it not a Passive. 
On the other hand, one could mean by Passive, 'the transitivity 
strategy that language x uses to  realize the Undergoer as the 
syntactic pivot'. So there is the 'impersonal se passive' common in 
Romance which has by and large supplanted the 'morphological passive' 
of 'to be + past participle'. For functionalists, this won't be news of 
course. For formalists, at least of the Minimalist variety, this will 
also not be news, because constructions are epiphenomenal and only 
label particular configurations of properties independently required of 
a particular combination of lexical items (modulo Hagit Borer's new 
book trilogy on exosyntax).

In grammar-writing this ambiguity can be a serious problem and, 
apparently, it also seeps into discussions by typologists. So we should 
always be clear as to whether our label of a construction refers to its 
form or its function.

-- Dan


------------------------------------------

Daniel L. Everett
Professor of Phonetics & Phonology
Postgraduate Programme Director
Postgraduate Admissions Officer
Department of Linguistics
The University of Manchester
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