THE PASSIVE IN ENGLISH: A CASE OF SYNTACTIC CHANGE

One of the questions addressed in this dissertation is which grammatical category should be assigned to past participles, whether they are adjectives or verbs. Another question is the way in which passive constructions are derived in the grammar of English, either in the syntax or in the lexicon. The hypothesis, due to Wasow (1977) and developed by Lightfoot (1979), was that verbal passives must be derived in the syntax and that this derivation is an innovation in the history of English. We first review the arguments for a syntactic distinction between the two kinds of passive in Modern English and show that most of them rather point to a semantic distinction. We then show the parallelism between syntactic passives and raising constructions. We propose that syntactic categories be viewed as divisions along continua and show that adjectival and verbal passive forms are part of a continuum between nonverbal and verbal categories. We then turn to the historical development of passive constructions in English and show that an analysis of the emergence of syntactic passive cannot be based on the collapse of the case system, nor on the introduction of a new rule. A number of texts from different periods between Old and Modern English were analyzed, and the evidence from modifiers, coordination and inflectional endings show that passive past participles could be both adjectives and verbs throughout the history of English. The extension of the passive construction to new syntactic environments is due to a reformulation of the passive rule as applying to the closest internal argument of the active verb. We show that the reanalysis of formerly prepositional indirect objects as passivizable internal arguments is a consequence of the way the case system collapsed, first for nominals and later for pronominals. This extension of the passive is independent of the semantic distinction between adjectival and verbal passives, and the verbal characteristics of the past participle in some passive constructions are due to the dynamic perfective aspect of those constructions in both Old and Modern English