Some structural properties of simple active and passive sentences

Abstract

The present experiment studied the diversity and covariation of the words used by Ss as the actor, verb, and object of simple active and passive sentences. Two groups of 60 Ss were given sentence-frames and asked to generate sentences. Informational uncertainty of the words Ss used in these sentence-frames was used as a measure of diversity. The results were: (a) In the active sentence, the actor had much less uncertainty than the verb and object. The actor varied relatively independently of the verb and object, which covaried more as a unit. (b) In the passive sentence, the object (the first sentence part and traditional "subject"), verb, and actor did not show noticeably different uncertainties. The object and verb constrained each other more than the actor constrained either of them; however, the actor was constrained considerably by the verb. (c) The Ss did not treat the passive sentence-frame simply as a transformed active sentence-frame, since the pattern of uncertainty in the actor, verb, and object and the use of animate nouns as actors and objects differed consistently in the two grammatical forms. These results present negative evidence for the notion that Ss generate passive sentences simply by imposing a transformation on active sentences, as Miller's (1962) transformational model would imply; instead, the results argue for a sequential left-to-right generation of sentences. © 1965 Academic Press Inc. All rights reserved.