Passive and Aktionsart

Tomislav Bukatarevi 2011

Considering the prototypical syntactic structure of the passive, with regards to the the lexical properties of
the Ven, the passive can be:
A) Verbal (regular, or true passive) where the Ven is a past participle verb.
B) Adjectival where the Ven is actually an adjective, be is copular, thus the structure is complex
intransitive. There are two subtypes of adjectival passives:
i. Semi-passives with possible active transformation or agentive phrase addition, e.g. They
were surprised by her attitude/Her attitude surprised them.
ii. Pseudo-passives there is no active counterpart; agentive phrase addition is impossible, e.g.
The statue is now broken (the resulting state).
Furthermore, an additional type can be discussed outside the prototypical structure:
C) Lexical (notional) passive the VP is active intransitive, yet the subject is the theme, rather than the
agent, which is excluded. There is usually an adverbial complement and implied modality in verb
meaning (cf. Quirk et al. (1985: 1565)), e.g. The door opened.

Vendler's (1967) quaternary division of verb situation types, through the scope of the distinctive features
introduced by Brinton (1988) would be: activities (-stative, +durative, -telic), states (+stative, +durative, -telic),
accomplishments (-stative, +durative, +telic), achievements (-stative, -durative, +telic).

Verbal passive

(1) Tonight the rightful guardians will be restored.

(2) His wisdom lived on, his words still whispered by thousands of faithful servants around the globe.

o The regular passives tend to keep the situation type regardless of voice.
o The majority of attested regular passives were telic situations achievements or accomplishments, the goal
being assigned by the theme argument. Activities with true passives are attested when the theme argument is a
plural/non-count DP, yet the context is the ultimate means to perceive the situation telic or atelic.
o Actionsart affected by passivization is attested with the following verbs: schedule, slate, disappoint and stun.
With these verbs, the active form belongs to achievements, being a momentary process leading to a result, yet
the passive form with the recipient subject involves some duration and behaves like a state the subject got in.
a. You were scheduled to meet with the curator(STA)
I scheduled you to meet with the curator. (ACH)
b. He and the revered curator Jacques Saunire had been slated to meet for drinks. (STA)
I had slated you and the curator to meet for drinks. (ACH).
c. He was disappointed when the curator had not shown. (STA)
The curator disappointed him when he had not shown. (ACH)
d. Langdon had been stunned to learn the planet Venus traced a perfect pentacle across the ecliptic sky every
four years. (STA)
e. Learning the fact stunned him. (ACH)

o Polysemous verbs do not necessarily have voice counterparts for each type of verb situation (as say).
a. The late French president who had commissioned the pyramid was said to have suffered from a "Pharaoh
complex". (ACT)
b. *People say the president to have suffered
c. John said that Alice didnt call. (ACH)
* That Alice didnt call was said by John.

1
Adjectival passive

When the verbal/adjectival status of the passive construction cannot be determined syntactically by using
adjectivity tests (cf. Huddleston and Pullum, 2002: 1436-1437), considering Aktionsart would help.

o All adjectival be-passives are states, since the Ven is actually an adjective which, in combination with the
copular be, has the features of a state resulting from a prior process (achievement or accomplishment). The
distinction can be summarised as:
A process leading to a state vs. a state resulting from a process
o Adjectival get-passives (get pseudo-passives) cannot be states because of the semantic features get introduces
to the situation being dynamic resultative copula. In this way, all get-passives, whether verbal or adjectival,
belong to either achievements or accomplishments.

Lexical passive

(3) The seventy-six-year-old man heaved the masterpiece toward himself until it tore from the wall
(4) As the Citron accelerated southward across the city...
(5) Fache's enormous palm wrapped around Langdon's with crushing force.

o The active verb prototypically transitive occurs without its internal argument and its external argument is
semantically non-agentive.
o The dynamic situation appears more dramatic in active without an agent.
o In some cases (3), the agent of the lexical passive verb can be recovered from the subject phrase, having the
same referent with the possessive adjective premodifying the NP representing his/her integral part.
o Aktionsart unaffected by lexical passivization.
o When depending on arguments for successful interpretation, telicity is not conditioned by the syntactic
category (object), but by the semantic role (theme).

On the data provided by the corpus, another category of passive can be established:

Lexical active the structure is syntactically passive yet semantically active:

(1) She glanced playfully at Langdon, who was seated onstage.

(2) His last correspondence from Vittoria had been in December a postcard saying she was headed to the Java Sea
o The syntactic structure consists of be + Ven, the V being prototypically intransitive.
o There is no theme, the external argument has agentive properties.
o It is possible to replace the structure with the true active, although there would be no argument movement.
o Other examples for the category would include: be gone, be drowned, and a lexical get-passive: get
started.
o Aktionsart is the same in both active and lexical active structures.