Formal work in linguistics has both produced and used important mathematical tools. Motivated by a survey of models for context and word meaning, syntactic categories, phrase structure rules and trees, an attempt is being made in the present paper to present a mathematical model for structuring of sentences from active voice to passive voice, which is is the form of a transitive verb whose gram...

whether or not there is a verbal passive construction in persian has been ‎highly controversial. traditional grammarians and most linguists have ‎argued that there is a structural passive construction in persian, similar to ‎that observed in english. within the framework of the minimalist ‎program, but more in the spirit of emonds’s (2006) division of analytic ‎passives into verbal and adjectiv...

English-speaking children are known to be delayed in their comprehension of passive sentences (Slobin, 1966; Turner & Rommetveit, 1967; Bever, 1970; Maratsos & Ambramovitch, 1975; Maratsos, Fox, Becker, & Chalkley, 1985; Gordon & Chafetz, 1990; Fox & Grodzinsky, 1998; Hirsch & Wexler, 2004a). Additionally, it has been noted that children’s level of passive comprehension is in part determined by...

Sentences like these are special insofar as their utterance in appropriate circumstances amounts to performing the action identified by the finite verb. The typical formal properties of such sentences in English include first person subjects, second person indirect objects, a present tense non-progressive active form of a speech act verb and the deictic adverb hereby, but performative sentences...

Second, the passive construction (‘has been discussed’) not only forces the use of the auxiliary verb ‘to be’, but also reduces energy by removing the agent of the action from the sentence. As Richard Lanham pointed out, you can’t tell ‘who’s kicking who?’ (sic) in a sentence in the passive voice [1]. Accordingly, in the example above you can’t tell who is doing the ‘discussing’. Traditionally,...

The bare form palu (1b) is used to express the Undergoer Voice (UV) in Balinese. It can be analysed as having a zero prefix, represented by Ø-, on the basis of systematic formal opposition with the other forms in (1). The zero prefix is a marker prefix in the same morphological slot as other voice markers in Balinese grammar, namely, the Actor Voice (AV) prefix N-, the passive (PASS) prefix ka-...

Abstract The IE languages developed different strategies for the encoding of passive function. In some language branches, middle voice extended to function varying extents. addition, dedicated derivational formations arose in a number languages, such as Greek - ē-/-thē- aorist and Indo-Aryan ya- presents. Periphrastic involving verbal adjective or participle are also widely attested, played an ...

In this paper, we investigate the usage of a non-canonical German passive alternation for ditransitive verbs, the recipient passive, in naturally occuring corpus data. We propose a classifier that predicts the voice of a ditransitive verb based on the contextually determined properties of its arguments. As the recipient passive is a low frequent phenomenon, we first create a special data set fo...

All studies that have examined children’s comprehension of passives using both actional (e.g. wash) and psychological (e.g. see) verbs in English have found a significant interaction of voice (active vs. passive) and verb type (actional vs. psychological), with psychological passives being answered most poorly. Accounts differ as to whether a grammatical impairment with passive syntax underlies...