Object- to Subject Raising or Lexical Rule - An HPSG Analysis of the German Passive

In this paper I develop a lexical rule based analysis for the passive in German in the paradigm of HPSG. Object-toSubject-Raising approaches will be discussed and it will be explained why a lexical rule based approach does not have their shortcomings. It will be shown that difficult cases of remote passive can be handled by such an analysis. 1 Object-to-Subject Raising In HPSG grammars for English and in LFG, the passive is analyzed as a lexical rule. For German many authors followed Haider (1986a) and analyzed the passive as object to subject raising (Heinz and Matiasek, 1994; Kathol, 1994; Lebeth, 1994; Pollard, 1994; Müller, 1999). The advantage of the raising analysis is that one entry for the participle is sufficient. The auxiliary for the perfect (1a), passive (1b), or dative passive (1c) attracts the arguments of the embedded participle in a way that is appropriate for the construction at hand. (1) a. Der the Mann man-NOM hat has den the Ball ball-ACC dem the Jungen boy-DAT geschenkt. given ‘The man gave the ball to the boy.’ b. Der the Ball ball-NOM wurde was dem the Jungen boy-DAT geschenkt. given ‘The ball was given to the boy.’ c. Der the Junge boy-NOM bekam got den the Ball ball-ACC geschenkt. given ‘The boy got the ball as a present.’ In the passive in (1b) the accusative object becomes the subject and the logical subject of the main verb is suppressed. In the dative passive a dative object is promoted to subject. 1.1 Designating the Accusative Pollard (1994) and Müller (1999) designate the argument that has the properties of an accusative object. For unergative verbs that take an accusative object, the designated ar†I gave talks about the German passive in Tübingen at the Seminar für Sprachwissenschaft and in Berkeley at HPSG 2000. I thank Tübingen for the invitation and the audiences of both talks for discussion. This work was supported by the Bundesministerium für Bildung, Wissenschaft, Forschung und Technologie (BMBF) (Project Verbmobil, Part 2.4, Grant Number 01 IV 701 V0). gument is the direct object, for ergative verbs it is the subject. (2) shows the lexical entry for geschenkt as it is used in the analysis of all three sentences in (1). (2) geschenkt (‘given’ participle form): 26666664HEAD 2664SUBJ D NP[str] E