this paper is an attempt to explore the prepositions used to encode the agent in persian passive constructions. according to givón (1983) the main function of the passive constructions is to defocus the agent. as the general trend in persian is to omit this defocused agent, we will stylistically divide the passive constructions into two main sub branches, namely unmarked and marked passives acc...

Kuroda (1979) argues that Japanese ni yotte passives are derived by movement of an underlying internal argument to subject position. The socalled syntactic passive pattern in Korean, derived with the bound verb -ci ‘become’, also gives strong evidence for a movement derivation (see Park 2001). Facts like those in (1-3) below support the movement analysis: (1-2) show that subject position is not...

This paper argues that the term ‘passive’ has been systematically misapplied to a class of impersonal constructions that suppress the realization of a syntactic subject. The reclassification of these constructions highlights a typological contrast between two types of verbal diathesis and clarifies the status of putative ‘passives of unaccusatives ’ and ‘transitive passives’ in Balto-Finnic and...

As children learn language they initially misunderstand reversible passive sentences as if they were active sentences. This error is an important clue to possible mechanisms by which children learn to understand passives in general. This paper reports on how the CHILD program learns to understand passive sentences, initially misunderstanding reversible passives a-s it does so. It presents an ex...

The paper presents Treelex, a valence lexicon of French adjectives automatically extracted from a treebank. The corpus contains morphological and syntactic annotations but no subcategorisation information is present for adjectives. Due to rich corpus annotations, our extraction method is guided by linguistic knowledge. The obtained lexicon (about 2000 adjectives and 40 frames) has been evaluate...

In this paper I examine two types of nominalizations related to color adjectives in Greek, a suffixed one and a neutral one, which I will compare to their English and Dutch (and German) counterparts. I show that the two differ in that suffixed nominalizations denote stage level properties, while neuter nominalizations denote individual level properties. This difference is due to the fact that s...

The electronic industry is reducing package dimensions of components as well as complete electronics systems. Surface mount device passives and semiconductor chips have to be mounted together bringing a functional system that must realize the required function with necessary reliability and acceptable price. To make up a reliable and cost effective system, the size and weight is being reduced b...

We propose an analysis of the morphology of dative-nominative passives in Icelandic. This account is based on a previous proposal of active predicates which alternate between a dative-nominative and nominative-dative case frame (Wood and Sigurðsson 2014). We show that obligatory agreement with the nominative in the passive is the consequence of the absence of the dative intervention effect whic...