Passives

Abstract

The English passive construction has played a central role in the to-ings and fro-ings of grammatical theory over the last 30 years, from the earliest days of transformational grammar, to more recent, surface oriented theories of syntax. The casual reader of the linguistic literature might therefore suppose that the computational linguist looking for an off the shelf analysis of passives would be able to choose from among several competing analyses, each of which accommodated the facts, but perhaps derived them from (or from them} different theoretical principles. Unfortunately, this is not the case. as we shall see. All of the analyses that [ am familiar with are incomplete, or inaccurate in some respects, or simply unprogrammable in any straightforward form. The present paper is an attempt to remedy this situation, and to provide such an off the shelf analysis of the syntax and semantics of passives. The analysis of this central construction will be couched within a simple and computationally tractable syntactic and semantic formalism, and should translate easily to most currently popular formalisms. It will be quite eclectic, freely borrowing from several different grammatical theories.