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<Paper uid="E87-1049">
  <Title>PASSIVES</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="309" end_page="311" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
PP
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> 48. VPvform passive, passive - V vform passive, subcat idiom, needs Z NPnform g PPpassive Then this idiomatic sense of 'take&amp;quot; is entered in the lexicon as V ....subcat idiom, needs advantage etc. The active form only gets parsed by rule 47, but both passive versions are accepted. (Incidentally, the idea of making different features share variable values can enforce correct verb-particle combinations, particular required PP forms, etc).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> This concludes the list of some of the syntactic problems faced by any analysis of verbal passives, and solved by that presented here. I have not to date encountered any other examples of passives in English which will not yield to some combination of the methods used in the preceding. While I would be the first to concede that these analyses leave a great deal to be desired in terms of elegance, explanatory power, and the other grand criteria by which syntactic theorie~ can be j,Ld~ed, they are conceptua\]ly and computational\[y quite Mmpie and appear to be descriptively adequate, a~though somewhat Iongwinded: a more economical grammatical formalism might express things more succinctly.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> I have said nothing about adjectival passives: these seem to be of two types, those that are already lexicalised as distinct items, like 'closed', and those produced by (fairly) productive derivationat rules, where the subcategorisation of the verb (minus the passivised NP) is inherited by the adjective: 49. The door remained open closed 50. The bottle remained empty filled with wine It is simple to incorporate a \[exical treatment of this phenomenon into the analysis here. and so I will say nothing more about them (see Levin and Rappaport 1986 for a detailed study).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Semantics of Passives I turn now to the semantics of passives. We have been assuming that the passive form of a verb, unless it is irregular, is derived by a morphological rule of affixation. The semantic effect of passive morphology on a verb is to switch around its first two arguments. Thus a transitive verb. in simplified form. would be represented as. say: 5l. hit: Aeso (hit e s o)  (where a A is followed by a sequence of variables, this is to be regarded as a shorthand for a 'curried' expression: i.e. Axyz .... Ax Ay Ax ...). The first variable in 51 is an &amp;quot;event' variable: I am assuming the Davidsonian(1980) analysis of verbs here: more on this below. I assume an affixation rule something like: 52. V--VAf: Af(V) Affixes are in general (polymorphic) things which take verbs to verbs: the relevant ones here introduce tenses and the passive.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> (i) past/'present= AVe (V e) /~, (past/present e) (ii) passive is of type {ez-(e~-(e~-a)))) ;,- (e~-(e~(e~-a)))). For transitive verbs passive amounts to AVexy (V e y x) Intuitively, tenses are predicates on events, and passive is an operator that has the effect of switching round the first two (non-event) arguments of the verb it applies to. The easiest way to see how all this fits together is to give sample derivations from the following little grammar (I will omit the feature specifications on rules for simplicity): S ---* NP VP : -qe (NP (VP e)} : the event variable is bound at the top level NP ~ Name : AP (P Name) : the rule raises the type  VP ---* Vtr NP : Aea (NP lab (V o a b))) : VPs are of type (e~ (e~t)) VP-- Vbe VP : Aea (Vbe e) &amp;quot; ((VP e) a) ; assume that &amp;quot;be' etc just carries tense VP -- VP PP : Aea ((VP e) a) ,' (ee e) ; PP modification is treated as a predication ; on the event</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> ; PPs are of type (e&gt;-t} Given these rules, and lexical entries, a VP like 'hit Bill' will be translated, after some variable renaming and a few rounds of beta reduction, as: 53. Aea (hit e a Bill) A (past e) Modifying this VP with a PP like 'in Cambridge'. will give a VP with translation: 54. Aea (hit e a Bill) ,&amp;quot; {.past e) * (in e Cambridge) Incorporating this into a sentence with subject 'John'. the above rules will get us: 55. _~e (hit e John Bill) &amp;quot; (past e) .', (in e CambridgeJ as a translation of 'John hit Bill in Cambridge': &amp;quot;there was a hitting by John of Bill event, in the past. in Cambridge' In the case where we have a passive like &amp;quot;Bill was hit'. application of the passive affix to the verb produces: 56. !AVexy (V e y x)! (Aeso (hit e s o)) reducing to: 57. Aexy (hit e y x} The VP containing the empty passive NP will translate as: 58, Aea (!AP (3i (P i))\] (Ab (\[Aexy (hit e y x)l e a b))) Notice that the passive morpheme has changed the order in which the verb expects its arguments. This beta-reduces tO: 59. Aea _:i (hit e i a) Incorporating this with the VP that introduced the passive VP as complement to &amp;quot;was' gives us: 60. ,~ea _:i (hit e i a) ; (past e) If we now combine this with the subject we will get, after reduction: 61. _:el (hit e i Bill) &amp;quot;., (past e) 'There was a past hitting by something of Bill event'. Notice that agent phrases for passives are treated in exactly the same way as any optional VP-modifying PP. So a VP like &amp;quot;was hit by John&amp;quot; - given some obvious assumptions about the translation of agentive &amp;quot;by'. and some way of selecting the translation appropriate to the sentence (as opposed to a locative or temporal &amp;quot;by') - will translate as: 62. Aea _=i (hit e i a) ' (past e) .' (agent e John) Notice that agentive PPs are not required to be adjacent to the passive verb. correctly. There is thus no syntactic connection between the presence of an agent phrase and passive morphology. This means that a sentence like: 63. John hit Bill by \['red on the agent reading of the PP. is treated as syntactically well-formed, but thematically incoherent in the same way that: 64. John hit Bill with a hammer with a chair  is. where the PPs both have instrument readings. We need an axiom achema to make the translations of 'John hit Bill' and 'Bill was hit by John&amp;quot; inter-deducible. This is not something extra demanded by this analysis. however: it is already needed to establish the connection between agents and certain types of events to account for the interpretation of agent phrases in nominatisations where the passive is not involved: 65. The hitting of Bill by John was an accident For the most part. this semantic analysis extends straight-forwardly to the other cases of passives discussed earlier. Their are three cases which need further comment, however. For datives, I assume that the NP PP and NP NP forms have different subcategorisations which are related by an obvious redundancy rule in the lexicon. However. we can assume that the verb has the same semantics in both cases: 66. kexyz (give e x y z) Associated with the rule that generates the ditransitive form will be a 'dative' operator, defined thus: 67. kVexyz (V e x z y) This has the effect of switching round the final two arguments of the verb. The rules will be:  68. VP ~ Vdat NP PP : Aex (PP (Az (NP (Ay (~dat e x y z))))) 69. VP -- Vdm NPi NPj : Aex (NPj (Az (NPi (Ay (V e x y z)l)))  where V is actually the dative operator applied to Vdm I assume that argument PPs like those associated with datives translate as something having the type of an NP. rather than a PP, as befits their interpretation. This can be implemented simply by marking these PPs as arguments and making the translation of a PP constituent so marked consist simply of the daughter NP: the preposition contributes nothing to the meaning. In the case of the Vdat rule, when the verb is in the passive, things are exactly analogous to the earlier cases (modulo differences caused by the \['act that the verb is of a different type): the passive morpheme simply switches round the arguments corresponding to subject and direct object. In the case of the Vdat rule, when in the active, the dative operator shifts the final two arguments, so that eventually the innermost term containing the verb will be of the form ... give e x z y. In the passive, what the dative operator applieC/ to is of the form ... give e y x z, because of the prior result of attaching the passive affix. Thus the result of the dative operator is of the form ... give e y z x.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> I will spare you the sequence of beta reductions involved. but with the rules and lexical entries given the right results are achieved. (For those with long linguistic memories. the sequence of lambda manipulations involved may seem strongly reminiscent of the standard theory TG treatment of constructions like this).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="8"> The treatment of argument PPs here is also needed for the 'rely on&amp;quot; type cases. The semantics of the rule is simple: 70. VP -- Vr PP : Aex (PP ray (Vr e x y))) The PP here also has the type of NP.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="9"> The final wrinkle concerns the appearance of intransitive verbs in passives. Applying a passive affix to an intransitive verb directly results in something that is not well typed: intransitives are here of type (e&gt;-(e&gt;-t)). The simplest course is to assume that under these circumstances the passive affix is simply ignored. Then we can associate with the relevant rule the semantics as follows: 71. VPpas --, Vintr P : Aex {_=i (Vintr i) . (P e x)) Given that tile meaning of &amp;quot;sleep' is Aex (sleep e x), this wilt produce a translation of &amp;quot;This bed was slept in recently' as: 72. -eib (sleep e i) .' (bed b) &amp;quot; {past e) ,' (in e b) :' (recent e) 'There has been a past sleeping of something event and that event was in this bed and recent'.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="10"> While this may seem a little clumsy, it seems to produce acceptable results. No other analysis \[ am familiar with has anything at all to say in detail about the semantics of these CaseS.</Paragraph>
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