It holds true that a flourishing fieldof Contrastive Rhetoric (CR) research has begun to address theway various text types and/or genres may differ across culturesand languages (Corner, 1996).  Very much in line withthis development, this study was an attempt to characterizethe linguistic structures of headlines in the sports section of 2 English newspapers: one non-Iranian (The Times) and one ...

The German bekommen-passive-construction presents an interesting case of grammaticalization-in-progress: It can be shown to be developing towards a passive construction that is used to code the dative argument of a ditransitive active clause as PSA. This will be attested by a discussion of the syntactic and pragmatic functions of the bekommen-passive construction. A comparison of various possib...

We report an experiment that examined 3and 4-year-old children’s representation of the passive structure. Early studies of typically-developing children’s acquisition of the passive suggest that this construction is acquired late and – or that its acquisition is semantically constrained: children comprehend actives much earlier than passives and comprehend actional verb passives earlier than no...

We present and partially evaluate procedures for the extraction of noun+verb collocation candidates from German text corpora, along with their morphosyntactic preferences, especially for the active vs. passive voice. We start from tokenized, tagged, lemmatized and chunked text, and we use extraction patterns formulated in the CQP corpus query language. We discuss the results of a precision eval...

Evidence from the Hansard corpus shows that the passive voice in British English has declined in relative frequency over the last two centuries. We investigate which factors are predictive of whether transitive verb phrases are passivized. We show the increasing importance of the person-hierarchy effects observed by Bresnan et al. (2001), with increasing strength of the constraint against passi...

This paper is about the impersonal passive construction of which modern Irish, a VSO language, has two forms. The impersonal passive form occurs with all verbs of Irish, across all tenses, whether intransitive or transitive. In the second form, the impersonal passive form is to be found productively with the substantive verb (one of the two verbs of ‘to be’ in Irish) across all tenses. It does ...