The English passive as an aspect

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1 <i>word</i> ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: The English passive as an aspect Christopher Beedham To cite this article: Christopher Beedham (1987) The English passive as an aspect, <i>word</ i>, 38:1, 1-12, DOI: / To link to this article: Published online: 16 Jun Submit your article to this journal Article views: 116 View related articles Citing articles: 1 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at Download by: [ ] Date: 28 December 2016, At: 12:15

2 CHRISTOPHER BEEDHAM The English passive as an aspect 1. Introduction. I would like here to present an account of the English passive, i,e. the construction with be + Past Participle, in which the passive is analysed as an aspect of the type Auxiliary + Participle (like the perfect and the progressive). Our exposition is in three parts. Firstly, the voice analysis, with its familiar active-passive relationship, is outlined in terms of the form, meaning and syntax of the passive. Then an aspectual analysis, which is meant to replace, not supplement the voice account, is presented, once again in terms of the form, meaning and syntax of the passive. Finally, the evidence for an aspectual analysis and against a voice analysis is recounted. Two kinds of evidence are given: several general, theoretical arguments and finally one lexical or lexico-grammatical argument. 2. The voice analysis. (See e.g. Quirk et al., 1972: ) Looking at (la), the form of the passive under a voice analysis is usually considered to be as follows. (I) a. Mary was hit by John. b. John hit Mary. Be in (la) is taken to be the passive auxiliary, a unique element in the grammar of English. Hit is analysed as a passive participle, again a unique element. The subject Mary is said to 'derive' from the object of an equivalent 'active' sentence, given here as (I b). Similarly, the agent John is said to relate to the subject of the equivalent active sentence. The preposition by is introduced as a special part ofthe passive rule. The meaning of the passive under a voice analysis is dealt with by saying that passives are roughly synonymous with their active counterparts. The only differences are those of information structure: given a distinction between old and new information, in the active the agent presents old information and is therefore theme or topic (the rest of the sentence being rheme or comment), whilst in the passive the patient is theme (see Halliday, 1967:215-18). The syntax, i.e. combinatorial possibilities, of passives is determined by transitivity, according to the voice analysis: if transitive verbs are defined as verbs followed by a direct object, then all and only transitive verbs form a passive.

3 2 WORD, VOLUME 38, NUMBER I (APRIL 1987) 3. The aspect analysis. An aspectual analysis interprets the form, meaning and syntax of the passive quite differently. The form of the passive is considered to be that of Auxiliary + Participle, like the perfect (have + Past Participle) and the progressive (be + Present Participle). 2 Be in the passive is analysed as an aspectual auxiliary, like have in the perfect and be in the progressive, and is thus not a unique element in the grammar of English. Likewise, the passive participle is an aspectual participle, like the past participle of the perfect and the present participle of the progressive, and is therefore also not a unique element in English. The noun phrases which appear in passives are selected from the lexicon, just as they are in the case of the perfect and the progressive, and are not derived from any supposed underlying active structure, for there is no category 'voice', no active-passive relationship, and no category 'active'. By is an ordinary preposition with a dictionary meaning of agentivity, participating in an ordinary prepositional phrase: the agentive by-phrase is optional, as prepositional phrases typically are, e.g. in Mary is angry (with John). The meaning of the actional passive is considered under an aspect analysis to be as follows: passives express a new state as the result of a preceding action or event. For example, in (la) the subject Mary can be said to enter a new state, viz. the state of having been hit, which arose out of the action of her being hit. Passives thus contain simultaneously a semantic element of state and a semantic element of action. Passives and 'actives' are therefore not synonymous, since passives contain a statal meaning which is absent in actives. It is from this basic meaning that the subject of the passive obtains its meaning of'receiverofthe action' or 'patient'. In Sec. 4.7 we establish a correlation between the passive and a variant of the perfect, the resultative perfect. The resultative perfect has a meaning very similar to the passive, since it expresses an action together with the new state that results from that action, as in Someone has broken her doll (the doll is now broken). In the case oftransitive verbs the change of state occurs on the object. The passive, however, is an intransitive construction, and consequently the change of state brought about by the action ofthe verb occurs on the subject. It is this change of state in the subject which produces the semantic role of patient. We are saying, therefore, that the patient role of the subject in passives is brought about by the passive's aspectual meaning of new state as the result of an action. There are, of course, other constructions besides be + Past Participle which have a patient subject, sometimes known as 'notional' passives, e.g. This string won't tie. The hat blew into the river.

4 BEEDHAM, ENGLISH PASSIVE 3 It seems advisable to follow M.A.K. Halliday's suggestion ( 1976: ) of calling all sentences with a patient subject receptive. Naturally, our aspectual explanation of one type of patient subject applies only to be + Past Participle. Whatever theme-rheme analysis is preferred for the passive can remain the same for an aspect analysis as for a voice analysis. For the subject of passives can still be interpreted as theme, whether the subject is taken from the lexicon or from a hypothesized underlying active structure. The syntax of an aspectual passive is as follows: the ability of a verb to form a passive is determined by the verb's lexical aspect, 3 and the possibility of a sentence being converted into the passive is determined by the compositional aspect of the sentence. Compositional aspect refers to the contribution that subject noun phrases, object noun phrases and certain adverbials make (along with the lexical aspect of the verb) to the overall aspect of the sentence (cf. Verkuyl, 1972). Verbs which will not combine with be + Past Participle to form a passive we will say have a lexical aspect called impassive. This step is consistent with the phenomenon of aspect compatibility, whereby the three types of aspect, Auxiliary + Participle aspect, lexical aspect and compositional aspect have to be semantically mutually compatible in order to eo-occur (cf. Friedrich, 1974:4). A well-known example of this is the incompatibility of verbs having the lexical aspect stative, such as know, with the Auxiliary + Participle aspect progressive: cf. *John is knowing the answer (cf. Lyons, 1977: ). Transitivity is now seen to be relevant to passive information only insofar as the presence of an object determines compositional aspect (see Sec. 4.6). 4. Evidence for an aspectual analysis. A voice analysis of the passive produces numerous contradictions and anomalies which are removed or resolved if the passive is interpreted as an Auxiliary + Participle aspect. The anomalies are of two kinds. Most are of a general, theoretical nature, but one most important contradiction concerning non-passivizable transitive verbs is of a lexico-grammatical nature The first and most obvious problem raised by postulating the existence of a category 'active' to which passives are then related, is the complexity of the analysis. The conversion from active to passive involves five operations, a fact which has been pointed out on many occasions and which, with Chomsky's (1957:43) first passive 'transformation', played a major role in the initiation of generative, 'formal' methods of analysing

5 4 WORD, VOLUME 38, NUMBER I (APRIL 1987) natural language (the implications of an aspectual analysis of the passive for generative grammar are discussed in Beedham, 1986). Looking again at the conversion of (I b) into (la), 4 the five operations are: the movement of the active object to the passive subject; the movement of the active subject to the passive's agentive by-phrase; the introduction of the auxiliary be; the change of the active's finite verb to the passive participle; the introduction of the preposition by. The contradiction here is that these five substantial operations produce no significant semantic changes whatsoever, apart from the subtle factor oftheme-rheme structure. This clearly cannot be. Lexical items and grammatical forms carry meanings, and whilst there can be a rare exception such as do in questions and negation, we cannot seriously expect a construction to exist which appears to involve five syntactic operations to no semantic effect. It is not the passive, the construction with be + Past Participle, which is peculiar, but its grammatical analysis with postulated underlying active structures, which is entirely anomalous. This gratuitous complexity does not arise, however, if the passive is analysed as an aspect. For the passive becomes simply one more member of a category which already exists in the grammar of English, viz. Auxiliary + Participle aspect, thereby achieving a great economy. At present most English grammars recognize two such aspects, the perfect and the progressive. I simply want to assimilate the passive to the category of Auxiliary + Participle aspect, making it three such aspects, the perfect, the progressive and the passive. The economy achieved consists in the fact that, although the category of aspect is expanded slightly, the large and cumbersome category of voice is removed altogether from the grammar of English. It will be worth emphasizing here that in doing this the problem of NP-switching becomes solved. For NP-switching is a consequence of a particular analysis, viz. the voice analysis, and if that voice analysis disappears, replaced by a new, aspect analysis, then the problem of NPswitching disappears with it. It is important to bear in mind that the active-passive relationship is not a piece of data-the data is the sequence NP-be V -ed (-by NP), the construction called the passive and which we abbreviate as be + Past Participle. The active-passive relationship is a theory, a hypothesis, an attempted analysis and explanation of be + Past Participle. If that analysis is shown to be inaccurate and incorrect, then it is quite legitimate to replace it with a new one. The aspectual explanation of the two noun phrases which occur in the passive was given in Sec. 3. To repeat: the noun phrase after by obtains its agentive meaning from the dictionary agentive meaning of the ordinary preposition by; and the

6 BEEDHAM, ENGLISH PASSIVE 5 subject of the passive receives its semantic role of patient (i.e. the same as the object of the equivalent active sentence) from the basic meaning which the passive has of expressing a new state in the subject which arises out of the action of the verb A further contradiction of the voice analysis is the introduction of be ex nihilo and without any meaning, either lexical or grammatical. Once again, be in passives must mean something, it must be there for a reason. If the passive is an aspect, the reason is clear: be is an aspectual auxiliary, just like have in the perfect, and is even precisely the same phonological form as occurs in the progressive. It is be in the passive which makes the greatest contribution, along with the passive participle, to the statal element in the meaning of the actional passive. The full verb be is followed by the most statal category of all, the adjective, as in Mary was angry. It is therefore only natural to find that be in the actional passive has a statal meaning, too. Furthermore, the statal passive, as in a statal interpretation of The door was closed as opposed to The door was closed by the porter, has a recognized and undeniable statal meaning. Again, it is therefore not surprising to find be in the actional passive also having a statal element somewhere in its meaning. Analysing be as an aspectual auxiliary also allows in other passive auxiliaries, such as get, become, grow, seem, remain, etc. (cf. Stein, 1979:20-27), all of which pose problems for a voice analysis. 4.3.The active-passive relationship also cannot explain what a participle is doing in the passive. But if the passive is an aspect, it is obvious that the participle is an aspectual participle, just like the present participle of the progressive, and indeed is precisely the same phonological form as occurs in the perfect. The participle contributes, along with be, to the statal element in the meaning of the actional passive. The presence of the verb contributes the actional element, and the presence ofthis particular form ofthe verb, the passive participle, contributes the statal element. As mentioned in Sec. 4.2, this can be seen in the participle's occurrence in a position reserved for that most statal category of all, the adjective, after full be, and in the existence in the grammar of English of the statal passive (see also Sec. 4.5). The notion that the passive may belongto the same category as the perfect receives confirmation from the occurrence of the past parti~iple in attributive position. For the attributive past participle may be either perfect (eg. The vanished jewels) or passive (eg. The murdered man), and may be ambiguous between the two (eg. The broken vase, which may

7 6 WORD, VOLUME 38, NUMBER I (APRIL 1987) mean either 'the vase has broken' or 'the vase was broken') (cf. Jespersen, 1924: ). This could only happen if the passive and the perfect were members of the same category, as proposed here An integral part of the voice analysis is the underlying active sentence, in which the subject is naturally obligatorily present. But Quirk et al., (1972:807) point out that four out of five passives occur without the agentive by-phrase, i.e. without that constituent which in the active is obligatory. Furthermore, the agent often does not appear because it is irrelevant or even unknown. Clearly, a passive with an unknown agent cannot be said to have come from a stucture with an obligatory subject. It is true that it seems plausible to claim that agentless passives come from an underlying active structure with 'someone' as subject. But this plausibility only stems from the fact that, if you are going to take the dubious step of postulating an underlying active structure which differs formally in five ways from the supposed related passive sentence, then you may as well take the further dubious step of hypothesizing that that underlying active structure can contain a semantically 'empty' subject, or some item such as 'someone'. But under the aspectual analysis no such dubious hypothesizing is needed. If the by-phrase is analysed as an ordinary prepositional phrase, then it is perfectly natural that it can be optional and the agent irrelevant or unknown, just as all prepositional phrases are optional An analysis of passive based on an active-passive relationship cannot account for the occurrence of statal passives, as in a purely statal interpretation of (2), where hit is more like an adjective than a participle. (2) Mary was hit. The question is, if (I b) expresses an action, and the actional passive (la), being synonymous with (lb), likewise expresses an action only, where does the pure state expressed in (2) come from? How can the same form express pure action in the actional passive and then suddenly a state in the statal passive? The answer is that (la) is not synonymous with (I b), for the actional passive (I a) already itself contains a semantic element of state in the meaning state as result of preceding action. This statal element simply reappears in the statal passive, but alone, without the action meaning It is well known that consistent application of the active-passive relationship often results in a passive sentence which is not entirely ungrammatical, but which is mostly definitely odd (cf. Svartvik 1966:2). Cf. the following examples:

8 BEEDHAM, ENGLISH PASSIVE 7 (3) a. John likes Mary. b.? Mary is liked by John. (4) a. John bought a car. b.? A car was bought by John. (5) -~A built house. Examples like these can be explained by the phenomenon of compositional aspect. As was mentioned in Sec. 3, Auxiliary + Participle aspects are sensitive to compositional aspect. Under compositional aspect the overall aspect of a sentence is determined by the presence and the type of subject, object and certain adverbials that occur in it. The following examples illustrate how a different type of subject, object and adverbial respectively change the overall aspect of the sentence: (6) a. For months the patients here died of jaundice. b. *For months a patient here died of jaundice. (7) a. John is singing songs. b. John is singing five songs. (8) a. John went to work yesterday. b. John went to work every day. Sentence (6a), with the durative expression for months, is grammatical, because the subject, the patients, is plural, allowing the whole sentence to be durative. In (6b) on the other hand, the singular subject a patient forces a perfective interpretation of a patient here died ofjaundice, which clashes with the durative for hours, resulting in ungrammaticality. Thus the type of subject present in the sentence is seen to influence compositional aspect (cf. Verkuyl, 1972: ; McCoard, 1978: 142). Sentence (7a) is atelic, whilst (7b) is telic. The semantic definition of telic is that telic sentences contain somewhere in their semantics a terminal point; atelic sentences do not. A quasi-syntactic test for this is that if the action described by a sentence in the present progressive is interrupted (so that any terminal point in it is not reached), the same sentence in the present perfect will be false if the sentence is telic, and true ifthe sentence is atelic. Thus, if the action of (7a) is interrupted, the sentence John has sung songs will be true, so (7a) is atelic, whilst if the action of (7b) is interrupted, the sentence John has sung.five songs will be false, so (7b) is telic. The difference here is caused by the unspecified object songs in (7a) versus the specified object five songs in (7b) (cf. Comrie 1978:44).

9 8 WORD, VOLUME 38, NUMBER I (APRIL 1987) Finally, (8a) with the adverb yesterday is perfective, while (8b) with the adverbial every day is iterative. The point is that the acceptability of passives can change if the type of subject, or object or adverbial present in the underlying active sentence is altered. Thus (3b) is improved by the underlying unspecified subject everyone, shown in (9), as opposed to the specified subject John of (3a): (9) Mary is liked by everyone. ( 4b) is improved if the underlying indefinite object a car is changed to a definite object, the car, shown in (10): (10) The car was bought by John. And (5) is improved by the addition of an adverb (cf. Quirk et al., 1972:911-12): (ll) A well-built house. Clearly, what is happening here is that subtle alterations to subject, object and adverbials are affecting the compositional aspect of these sentences, which in turn affects their compatibility with the passive, as is usual with Auxiliary + Participle aspects. The phenomenon of aspect compatibility can also explain the passivizability of prepositional verbs, such as live in, talk about. For here again it must be the lexical aspect of these verbs, together with the compositional aspect of the sentence in which they appear, rather than transitivity, which determines their ability to form a passive A perfect-passive correlation. The last anomaly thrown up by a voice analysis that we will look at concerns verbs which do not form a passive despite being transitive. These verbs constituted a relatively well-defined set of lexical exceptions to a grammatical rule (viz. the voice rule of passive formation), and as such provided a means for empirical (inductive) study, the results of which led to the theoretical (deductive) observations made in Secs Briefly, the discovery I (am claiming to) have made is that the majority of non-passivizable transitive verbs are also precluded from the resultative perfect. So the passive is behaving just like the perfect, and thus shows itself to be of the same category as the perfect, viz. an Auxiliary + Participle aspect. Although the perfect can be glossed generally as meaning 'past with current relevance' (Quirk et al., 1972:91), it actually has at least two dis-

10 BEEDHAM, ENGLISH PASSIVE 9 tinct meanings, a continuous meaning and a resultative meaning. In the continuous perfect the action expressed by the verb begins in the past and continues into the present, as in (12): (12) We have lived in London since September. The perfect of result, on the other hand, expresses an action together with the state which results from that action, as in (13): (13) Someone has broken her doll. The state that results from the action of the verb can always be expressed in the form be + Adjective or be + Statal Passive. Thus if (13) is true then the sentence Her doll is broken is also true (cf. Leech, 1971 :30-35; McCawley, 1971). After conducting a systematic and exhaustive investigation of the transitive verbs of English (Beedham, 1982:59-82, ), it turned out that the same verbs which were inexplicably precluded from the passive tended also to be precluded from the resultative perfect. In fact, one is forced to deal not with verbs but with sentences, since passivizability is not a lexical but a compositional matter. But the principle of this correlation between the passive and perfect is nevertheless distinctly observable. Taking only those sentences containing non-passivizable transitive verbs which I examined, approximately two-thirds of them also did not form a resultative perfect. Taking both non-passivizable transitive verbs and transitive verbs which did not form a resultative perfect together, then approximately halfformed neither a passive nor a resultative perfect (the remainder formed one but not the other construction). Examples of this phenomenon are given in (14-22). Sentences (14-18) are precluded from both the passive and the resultative perfect. Sentences (19a) and (20a) form a resultative perfect but no passive, whilst (21a) and (22a) form a passive but no resultative perfect (in some cases the asterisks against the perfect sentences refer to a resultative interpretation only, i.e. these may be grammatical under some other interpretation of the perfect): (14) a. The book costs fifteen pounds. b. *Fifteen pounds is cost by the book. c. *The book has cost fifteen pounds. (15) a. John has a big house. b. *A big house is had by John. c. *John has had a big house.

11 10 WORD, VOLUME 38, NUMBER I (APRIL 1987) (16) a. Julia resembles Christine. b. *Christine is resembled by Julia. c. * Julia has resembled Christine. (17) a. Your new coat suits you. b. *You are suited by your new coat. c. *Your new coat has suited you. (18) a. Rupert knows the Prime Minister. b. *The Prime Minister is known by Rupert. c. *Rupert has known the Prime Minister. (19) a. Martha married Roy. b.?roy was married by Martha. c. Martha has married Roy. (20) a. Wilfred got the assignment. b. *The assignment was got by Wilfred. c. Wilfred has got the assignment. (21) a. Norman owns the red house. b. The red house is owned by Norman. c. *Norman has owned the red house. (22) a. Everyone desires happiness. b. Happiness is desired by everyone. c. *Everyone has desired happiness. The perfect-passive correlation exemplified in (14- I8) exists because of the close similarity in meaning between the passive and the resultative perfect. Both constructions express a state as the result of an action, and consequently are incompatible with roughly the same verbs and sentences. Sentences (14- I8) must contain a lexicallcompositional aspect which is incompatible with both the passive and the resultative perfect. But (19-22) appear to contradict the correlation. Beedham ( I982: 107- I I) attempts to speculate as to why sentences like ( I9-22) do not behave consistently with respect to the perfect-passive correlation. We will not repeat those speculations here. Suffice it to say that there must be something special about the lexical/compositional aspects in

12 BEEDHAM, ENGLISH PASSIVE 11 them which touches upon the semantic differences between the passive and the resultative perfect, to disturb the correlation. At any event, a sufficiently large proportion of transitive verbs are precluded from both the passive and the resultative perfect to warrant the conclusion that the passive is here behaving exactly like the perfect, i.e. like an Auxiliary + Participle aspect. 5. Conclusion. The balance of evidence, then, is overwhelmingly in favour of an aspect analysis against a voice analysis. The hypothesis under which a category of sentence 'active' is assumed raises so many problems as to be untenable, and these problems are solved or removed by an aspect analysis. Therefore we conclude that the passive, the construction formed from be + Past Participle, is an Auxiliary + Participle aspect, meaning the expression of a new state as the result of a preceding action (whereby, since the passive is intransitive, the subject undergoes a change of state, thus acquiring a semantic role of patient), and whose syntactic behaviour is dependent upon lexical and compositional aspect. Department of German University of St. Andrews Fife KY/6 9PH Scotland ENDNOTES 'This paper brings together and refines the arguments for English contained in Beedham (1981, 1982). The latter works have been mistakenly interpreted by some readers as being either contrastive, or as arguing across languages. They were intended, however, to be neither of these things, but embody, in fact, three parallel investigations, presenting evidence for an aspectual analysis of the passive which is internal to each of the three languages examined. To clarify this point, and to make our work more accessible, the arguments for the three languages are being presented in separate articles for each language: the present paper for English, Beedham ( 1987) for German, and Beedham (forthcoming a) for Russian. A substantial addition in the present paper to Beedham ( 1981, 1982) is a more explicit account of how an aspectual meaning of the passive explains the 'patient' role of the passive subject (Sec. 3). The advantages of investigating the same formal construction in more than one language are discussed in Beedham (forthcoming b). 'On the perfect and progressive aspects see Quirk et al., 1972: n lexical aspect see Comrie, 1978:41-51, but beware his semantic approach-aspect can only be approached syntactically (cf. Macaulay, 1978).

13 12 WORD, VOLUME 38, NUMBER I (APRIL 1987) Another indication of the incorrectness of the voice analysis is that its favourite example, (la), containing the verb hit in order to reinforce the patient role of the subject, is neither a typical nor a particularly good passive sentence. Quirk et al., (1972:809-09) give as a typical passive sentence This difficulty can be avoided in several ways. However, since the case for an aspect analysis depends to a great extent on refuting the voice analysis, we will continue to use (la) to illustrate our points. REFERENCES Beedham, Christopher "The passive in English, German and Russian." Journal of Linguistics, 17: The passive in English, German and Russian. Tiibingen: Narr "Descriptive versus generative grammar: the passive." Language Sciences, 8: "Das deutsche Passiv: Aspekt, nicht Genus verbi." Deutsch als Fremdsprache 24.3: forthcoming a. "Byt' + stradatel'noe pricastie kak vid, a ne kak zalog," Voprosy yazykoznaniya forthcoming b. "Investigating grammar through lexical exceptions: tense and irregular verbs in English, German and Russian" Journal of literary semantics. Chomsky, Noam Syntactic structures. The Hague: Mouton. Comrie, Bemard Aspect. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. Friedrich, Paul On aspect theory and Homeric aspect. International Journal of American Linguistics 40, Memoir 28. Halliday, M.A.K "Notes on transitivity and theme in English. Part 2." Journal of Linguistics, 3: System andfunction in language. Selected papers. Ed. by G.R. Kress. London: Cambridge Univ. Press. Jespersen, Otto The Philosophy of grammar. London: Alien & Unwin. Leech, Geoffrey N Meaning and the English verb. Harlow: Longman. Lyons, John Semantics. Vols I & 2. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. Macaulay, R.K.S "Review of Aspect by B. Comrie and On aspect theory and Homeric aspect by P. Friedrich." Language, 54: McCawley, James D "Tense and Time Reference in English." In: C.J. Fillmore, D.T. Langendoen (eds.). Studies in Linguistic Semantics. Pp New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. McCoard, Robert W The English perfect: Tense-choice and pragmatic inferences. The Netherlands: North Holland. Quirk, Randolph; S. Greenbaum;G. Leech;&J. Svartvik(eds.) A Grammar of Contemporary English. London: Longman. Stein, Gabriele Studies in the Function of the Passive. Tiibingen: Narr. Svartvik, Jan. 1%6. On Voice in the English Verb. The Hague: Mouton. Verkuyl, H.J On the compositional nature of the aspects. Foundations of Language, Supplementary Series, Vol. 15.