The Mystery of the Missing Agent: Reconstructing Passives

ABSTRACT. Contrary to popular opinion, verbal passives in English or German far from always imply an agent, however loosely the term is understood – often enough, passives of causative predicates only imply causing events, not causer individuals. This fact has not been duly appreciated in the vast literature on voice and related phenomena. It raises challenges for composition and for the question what purpose is served by passive voice. We draw two conclusions: (i) Event-type subjects and “by ” phrases are modifiers, not arguments, and the event-type pro introduced by passive voice is semantically vacuous; (ii) Event-type passives fill a semantic gap between inchoatives and agent-type passives of causative predicates, and they facilitate narrative cohesion by providing event referents that can unify with already introduced event referents. 1 The Passive Prejudice They all presuppose that there is an agent, only, (s)he has gone underground (“the agent does not disappear altogether (for argument structure cannot change)”) – even since some began to build argument structures (again) (Hale and Keyser, Kratzer, Marantz, Borer, Harley and Noyer, Pylkkänen), this presupposition ha