Research

Ohio State Dissertations in Linguistics (OSDL)

Gwang-Yoon Goh (2000)

The Synchrony and Diachrony of the English Prepositional Passive: Form, Meaning and Function

Advisor: Brian Joseph

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Abstract:

The English language has been examined by scholars more than practically any other language, and both its synchronic and diachronic aspects are relatively well-known. Despite this intense scholarly activity, though, there are some areas of the syntax of English that remain as puzzles.

One such area is the prepositional passive (P-Passive), in which the passive subject corresponds to the object of a preposition (P) in the active (e.g., He was laughed at). This syntactic construction is noteworthy in many respects. In particular, it is cross-linguistically rare and even in English, it is not found before Middle English (ME). Furthermore, many non-syntactic factors affect the P-Passive, thus presenting analytic challenges to most current syntactic theories. For these reasons, the P-Passive and the changes it has undergone constitute an important topic in English synchronic and diachronic linguistics which can provide valuable insights into the general nature of language, and into the form and causes of language change.

This study, which is aimed at showing how form, meaning and function interact with one another in the synchrony and diachrony of language, pursues the following two primary goals: (a) to present an overall picture of the changes in the English P-Passive, showing the effects of various system-internal and system-external factors in bringing them about, and (b) to provide a new analysis of this syntactic construction in contemporary English which incorporates both formal and functional aspects of the construction.

Specifically, this study proposes that the advent of the prepositional passive was a long-term multi-faceted morphosyntactic change that was eventually triggered by a " subject-requirement constraint " and the consequent obligatoriness of NP-movement out of PP in passive structures, which resulted in the syntactically-triggered incorporation of P into verb (V). In particular, it is shown that although both the P-Passive and the so-called reanalysis of V and P, in their periphrastic forms, began to develop in ME, their advent cannot be considered innovative purely within the ME period because they already had OE antecedents in disguised forms, which played significant roles in their emergence.

As for the P-Passive in contemporary English, a set of new proposals are made to deal with not only the P-Passive type involving a complement PP (e.g., It was looked into) but also the type involving an adjunct PP (e.g., The bed was slept in). In particular, this study argues against both the Reanalysis Hypothesis and the No-Reanalysis Hypothesis about the unification of V and P into a single structural unit and proposes obligatory syntactic incorporation of P into V which is triggered by passive morphology. This study also explains what really determines the passivization possibilities of prepositional objects by proposing one formal and two functional factors (i.e., complementhood, affectedness, and characterization). Finally, a set of formally adequate formulations of the proposals made for the P-Passive are provided within the Head-Driven Structure Grammar framework, showing that the alternative account can be given a coherent treatment within a current theoretical framework.

In conclusion, the results of this research demonstrate the interdependence between various components of the grammar by showing that a typical syntactic change is not purely syntactic in nature, but rather requires input from practically every domain of the grammar in order to be fully understood. Further, theanalysis proposed for the P-Passive in contemporary English illustrates how formal and functional factors interact with each other to form a major syntactic construction and to determine its grammaticality and acceptability.