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...

This paper reconciles conflicting evidence on the nature of adjectival passives. Some evidence suggests that externalization of an internal argument in adjectival passives is a lexical operation not involving syntactic movement, while other evidence suggests that adjectival passive participles project an internal argument in the syntax. It is proposed that a subject may be base generated in a p...

The paper develops a new perspective on the semantics and pragmatics of adjectival passives that focuses on their characteristic context dependency. Adjectival passives are analyzed as a flexible grammatical means of creating a potentially new ad hoc property based on the verbal event by which the subject referent is categorized according to contextually salient goals. The post state vs. target...

The purpose of this paper is to show that the so-called Experiencer-Object (EO) psychological verbs in English have external argument contra Belletti and Rizzi 1988, Grimshaw 1990 and that the structure proposed by Belletti and Rizzi 1988 is not correct. Bouchard 1995, Iwata 1995, and Chung 1998 have already pointed out that the psychological verbs have external argument. This study provides ne...

The pseudo-passive is peculiar in that (i) the DP that appears to be the complement of a preposition undergoes passivization, and (ii) it is semantically characterized by the fact that it describes a resultant state or a characteristic of the Theme. The first peculiarity can be explained if the DP is not the complement of P but the complement of the V-P complex. However, the problem with this a...

Abstract This paper argues that < ser ‘to be’ + past participle> constructions with subject-experiencer psychological verbs are adjectival passives, contra the received view verbal passives across board. We put forth a battery of morphological, syntactic and semantic tests to support our claim. The divide, we argue, is based on individual-level/stage-level distinction, rather than lexical...

This paper addresses Spanish adjectival passives with estar showing a progressive reading. In the previous literature, it has been acknowledged that participles of verbs encoding non-dynamic events, such as vigilar ‘guard’, give rise to reading when embedded in passives. Yet, we have identified another group verbs, those type perseguir ‘chase’, which denote dynamic atelic events (i.e., activiti...