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...

english passive has always been regarded as a challenge by farsi-speaking efl learners. despite the presence of many linguistic and pedagogical approaches in studying and teaching english passive, there still appears to be a pedagogical gap facing farsi-speaking efl learners dealing with this construction. taking up the cognitive-construction grammar perspective, the present article aims to inv...

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 chapter offers an overview of the little studied Polish impersonal construction which is made up of an auxiliary or copular verb in 3SG.N and a passive or resultative -n-/-tparticiple bearing the singular neuter inflection -e. I describe the morphological form and syntactic behaviour of this construction, demonstrate that it is not only functionally impersonal but also syntactically subjec...

An antipassive construction is a derived detransitivized construction with a two-place predicate, related to a corresponding transitive construction whose predicate is the same lexical item. In the basic transitive construction, the patient-like argument is realized as a direct object; in the antipassive construction, that argument is either suppressed (left implicit) or realized as an oblique ...

This article suggests evidence for and reasons why prior acquisition may either facilitate or inhibit acquisition of a new construction. It investigates acquisition of the German passive and future constructions which contain a lexical verb with either the auxiliary sein "to be" or werden "to become", and are related through these to potential supporting constructions. We predicted that a suppo...

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...