Dear WG,
Maybe Chet and Jasper are right. I said in an earlier message that I
thought English passives were formed by derivation (as well as inflection)
because inflection alone wouldn't allow the passive linking pattern to
override the active one. This argument rested on the assumption that the
active pattern would be fixed lexically, i.e. lexeme by lexeme, but of
course the problem would disappear if active linking was fixed by default
rules for all verbs, as a lot of people assume (including some people on
this list). Since Passive (the inflection) isa Verb, its rules would
automatically override those which apply to Verb. In fact you could use the
existence of passive as an inflection as evidence for a high-level linking
rule.

But suppose this is true. How does the active rule work? And how does it
get the right linkages for all the problem cases we know of (like/please,
spray-load alternations, and so on)? The rule will have to map the referent
of the subject to X, that of the direct object to Y and that of the
indirect object to Z; and then the passive rule will change these mappings
so that the subject maps to Z or Y and the by phrase to X. But what are X,
Y and Z? They sound to me remarkably like our old friend 'argument
structure', which some of us have tried so hard to do without because we
couldn't decide whether it belongs in syntax or in semantics. 

Maybe argument structure is ok after all? I.e. maybe there is a
language-oriented level of cognitive structure, as I think Jasper and I
decided in our Re-cycling paper. But if there is, there's a lot of
redundancy if I'm also right about the need for empty (PRO) subjects
because this provides a relatively semantics-oriented syntactic structure
which interfaces rather easily with the syntax-oriented semantics of
argument-structure.

Dick

Richard (= Dick) Hudson

Phonetics and Linguistics, University College London, 
Gower Street, London WC1E  6BT.
+44(0)171 419 3152; fax +44(0)171 383 4108;
http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/home.htm


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