The history of the English ‘passive’ construction: From intransitive predication to passive construction through intersubjectification

The history of the English ‘passive’ construction: from intransitive predication to passive construction through intersubjectification This paper examines the development of the passive construction from Old English (OE) to Early Modern English (EME), focussing on the interaction between functional, structural and lexical changes in the history of its use. First, it is argued that, in Old English, the passive construction formed part of a constructional network which also comprises copula constructions and intransitive perfect constructions, as evidenced in the structural similarity of sentence types (1)-(3). (1) hie.NOM-M-PL sind/beoð/weorþað witode.NOM-M-PL ‘they are/will be/get punished’ (2) hie.NOM-M-PL sind/beoð/weorþað grame.NOM-M-PL ‘they are/will be/get angry’ (3) hie.NOM-M-PL sind/beoð/?weorþað cumen.NOM-M-PL ‘they have/will have/will come’ Besides sharing agreement of subject and subject complement, (1)-(3) can all be seen as kinds of intransitive predication. The passive auxiliaries in (1), similar to copulas (see (2)), then, link a non-agentive subject and an adjectival participle that defines a property of the subject (hie sind witode = ‘they have the property of being punished’). The choice between different auxiliaries, furthermore, depended on a range of semantic and pragmatic distinctions: beon expressed duratives, wesan or standan resultatives, beon or, if something harmful was predicated of the subject, weorðan, momentary or future changes. As such, the passive has both a representational (non-subjective) function (namely, identifying a property of the subject), and an attitudinal (subjective) one (e.g. construing a situation as an intransitive process or as a state). By contrast, the passive construction in EME had (also) acquired an addressee-oriented (intersubjective), information-rearranging function. More specifically, it was increasingly used to topicalize the patient of a transitive event (Seoane 2006), as in Not you, but I pulled his leg and therefore I was punished by him, where OE would use OVS order instead (me witode he ‘me punished he’). The main instigator of this development probably was the establishment of fixed SVO order, which caused the topic and subject slots to overlap. The development of the passive from OE to EME, then, appears to be an instance of intersubjectification, i.e. a shift from representational (non-subjective) to attitudinal (subjective) to addressee-oriented (intersubjective) (Traugott and Dasher 2005). While this process has been examined in detail for the modals, passive auxiliaries have hardly been studied from this perspective. By examining several lexical and structural sub-developments within the passive, this paper takes a first step in filling this gap. Structural developments are (i) the loss of adjectival markers on participles (Mustanoja 1960: 440); (ii) the emergence of prepositional passives (Denison 1985); (iii) the replacement of synthetic future passives (expressed by finite forms of beon) by analytic future passives, and (iv) the increased importance of the referential relationship between passive subject-topics and the speech act participants (Croft 2001: 315). The major lexical change is (v) the specialization of is/are/be [non-finite] as the only passive auxiliary and the loss of beon [finite] and weorðan. I will explain how this loss, which is still unaccounted for, is a consequence of the new intersubjective, patient-topicalizing function of the passive gradually overriding former semantic and pragmatic distinctions expressed by these obsolete auxiliaries. References: Croft, W. (2001) Radical Construction Grammar. Syntactic Theory in Typological Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Denison, D. (1985) ‘Why Old English had no prepositional passive’. English Studies 66 (3), 189-204. Mustanoja, T. F. (1960) A Middle English syntax. Helsinki: Société néophilologique. Seoane, E. (2006) ‘Information Structure and Word Order Change: The Passive as an Information-rearranging Strategy in the History of English.’ In: Van Kemenade, A.M.C., Los, B. (ed.). The handbook of the history of English. Oxford: Blackwell. 360-391. Traugott, E.C. and R.B. Dasher (2005) Regularity in Semantic Change (Cambridge Studies in Linguistics, 97), 2nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.status: publishe