He was run-over by a bus: Passive – but not pseudo-passive – sentences are rated as more acceptable when the subject is highly affected. New data from Hebrew, and a meta-analytic synthesis across English, Balinese, Hebrew, Indonesian and Mandarin

Abstract

Several recent experimental studies have investigated the hypothesis that the passive construction is associated with the semantics “[B] (mapped onto the surface [passive] subject) is in a state or circumstance characterized by [A] (mapped onto the by-object or an understood argument) having acted upon it”. (Pinker, Lebeaux & Frost, 1987). In the present work, we extend this method to a new language, Hebrew, and conduct a Bayesian mixed-effects meta-analytic synthesis which draws together the findings of similar studies conducted for English, Indonesian, Mandarin and Balinese. For Hebrew, we found that native adult speakers’ (N=60) acceptability ratings for passives with each of 56 different verbs were significantly predicted by verb-semantic-affectedness ratings provided by a separate group of 16 native adult speakers. Both for Hebrew and across languages, we found that (a) these semantic-affectedness ratings predict verbs’ acceptability in both passive and non-passive constructions, but (b) the effect is bigger for passives than non-passives. These findings raise the possibility that a passive construction that denotes undergoer-affectedness may approach the status of a semantic universal.