English Prepositional Passive Constructions

An empirical overview of the properties of English prepositional passives is presented, followed by a discussion of formal approaches to the analysis of the various types of prepositional passives in HPSG. While a lexical treatment is available, the significant number of technical and conceptual difficulties encountered point to an alternative approach relying on constructional constraints. The constructional approach is argued to be the best option for prepositional passives involving adjunct PPs, and this analysis can be extended to create a hierarchy of constructions accommodating all types of prepositional passives in English, and the ordinary NP passive. 1 Syntactic and non-syntactic constraints In addition to the ordinary passive alternation involving transitive verbs (1a), English allows “prepositional passives” (also referred to as “pseudopassives”), where the subject in the passive structure corresponds to the object of a preposition in the related active structure (1b–c). (1) a. Kim planted the tree. ; The tree was planted by Kim. b. Kim looked after the tree. ; The tree was looked after by Kim. c. Kim sat under the tree. ; The tree was sat under by Kim. As noted by Huddleston and Pullum (2002, p. 1433), prepositional passives can be divided into two classes, depending on the syntactic function of the PP. In Type I prepositional passives, the PP is a complement whose prepositional head is idiomatically selected by the verb, as in (1b); in Type II prepositional passives as in (1c), the preposition is not part of a verbal idiom. Huddleston and Pullum, suggest that the availability of Type I prepositional passives is ultimately an idiosyncratic lexical property that must be indicated in the dictionary entries of verbal idioms (although, as far as I know, no dictionary explicitly provides this information). Type II passives, on the other hand, are subject to primarily pragmatic constraints. The linguistic literature on prepositional passives confirms this basic description, while offering a more complex picture of the kinds of constraints involved. It is clear that the prepositional passive is much more restricted than the ordinary passive, which applies quite systematically to all transitive verbs, with a handful of lexical exceptions (e.g., *Two weeks were lasted by the strike, *Quintuplets were had by an exhausted mother in Des Moines). Whether a given verb + PP combination will give rise to an acceptable prepositional passive depends on various, poorly understood syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic factors. Context, usage and frequency effects, †I thank Patrick Blackburn and the research group TALARIS at Loria (UMR 7503, Nancy, France) for their support of this research.