Passives of Spanish Subject-Experiencer Psychological Verbs are Adjectival Passives

Pseudo-Passives as Adjectival Passives

The pseudo-passive is peculiar in that (i) the DP that appears to be the complement of a preposition undergoes passivization, and (ii) it is semantically characterized by the fact that it describes a resultant state or a characteristic of the Theme. The first peculiarity can be explained if the DP is not the complement of P but the complement of the V-P complex. However, the problem with this a...

Adjectival Passives and Adjectival Decausatives in Hebrew

External Argument and English Psychological Verbs

The purpose of this paper is to show that the so-called Experiencer-Object (EO) psychological verbs in English have external argument contra Belletti and Rizzi 1988, Grimshaw 1990 and that the structure proposed by Belletti and Rizzi 1988 is not correct. Bouchard 1995, Iwata 1995, and Chung 1998 have already pointed out that the psychological verbs have external argument. This study provides ne...

Passives

The English passive construction has played a central role in the to-ings and fro-ings of grammatical theory over the last 30 years, from the earliest days of transformational grammar, to more recent, surface oriented theories of syntax. The casual reader of the linguistic literature might therefore suppose that the computational linguist looking for an off the shelf analysis of passives would ...

Event passives

Event passives are verbal passives of causative predcates which involve only a causing event and no agent. Studying this kind of passive, I critically review the popular claim in research on passives and implicit arguments that verbal passives semantically always include an implicit argument (Bhatt & Pancheva 2006). I contend that this view is not very reasonable from a semantic perspective. Mo...