English prepositional passive constructions

As noted by Huddleston and Pullum (2002, p. 1433), prepositional passives can be divided into two classes, depending on the syntactic function of the PP. In Type I prepositional passives, the PP is a complement whose prepositional head is idiomatically selected by the verb, as in (1b); in Type II prepositional passives as in (1c), the preposition is not part of a verbal idiom. Huddleston and Pullum, suggest that the availability of Type I prepositional passives is ultimately an idiosyncratic lexical property that must be indicated in the dictionary entries of verbal idioms (although this is rarely the case). Type II passives, on the other hand are subject to primarily pragmatic constraints. The linguistic literature on prepositional passives confirms this basic description, while offering a more complex picture of the kinds of constraints involved. It is clear that the prepositional passive is much more restricted than the ordinary passive, which applies quite systematically to all transitive verbs, with a handful of lexical exceptions. Whether a given verb + PP combination will give rise to an acceptable prepositional passive depends on various, poorly understood syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic factors. Context, usage and frequency effects, and lexical idiosyncrasies also play a crucial role. Previous accounts of the phenomenon rely on notions like “affectedness” or “role prominence” of the passive subject (Riddle and Sheintuch, 1983; Bolinger, 1977, 1978). These proposals are intuitively appealing, but it remains unclear how they can be satisfactorily formalized. Many authors argue that a high degree of “cohesion” between the verb and the “stranded” preposition is a necessary condition for the well-formedness of the prepositional passive. One version of this approach suggests that V and P are in fact reanalyzed as a complex predicate (e.g., Hornstein and Weinberg, 1981). The fact that V and P typically appear immediately adjacent to one another is taken as evidence for reanalysis. The well-known exception that certain idiomatic direct objects can intervene between V and P in the prepositional passive (2) is not necessarily problematic, nor are the examples of phrasal verbs in (3).