Modeling the Decline in English Passivization

The Effect of Feature Hierarchies on Frequencies of Passivization in English

INVESTIGATING THE ROLE OF CAUSATIVIZATION IN OVERPASSIVIZATION OF UN-ACCUSATIVE VERBS BY IRANIAN ENGLISH MAJORS

The current study aims at exploring the role of causativization as one of the causes stated in the literature for overpassivization of English unaccusatives in an Iranian context.The study was conducted using three data collection procedures, an Oxford Placement Test, a Grammaticality Judgment Task, and a Production Task. The results revealed that causativization errors with non-alternating una...

Soft Constraints Mirror Hard Constraints: Voice and Person in English and Lummi

The same categorical phenomena which are attributed to hard grammatical constraints in some languages continue to show up as statistical preferences in other languages, motivating a grammatical model that can account for soft constraints. The effects of a hierarchy of person (1st, 2nd 3rd) on grammar are categorical in some languages, most famously in languages with inverse systems, but also in...

On the use of passives across Germanic

Introduction There has long been an intuition that the subject position is deeply relevant to information structural concerns cross-linguistically, particularly because they frequently appear at the left edge of a clause, which is thought to be associated with given/topical information (cf. Vallduvi 1992). This raises interesting questions about the role of the passive construction in the disco...

Aspectual properties of the English middle construction

The aim of the present paper is to investigate the aspectual properties of middle constructions in English. English middle constructions are non-eventive sentences deno ting a property of the grammatical subject. Middle formation seems to have certain similarities with passivization as both processes involve demotion or deletion of the external argument and promotion of the internal argument to...