In English, transitive events can be described in various ways. The main possibilities are active-voice and passive-voice, which are assumed to have distinct semantic and pragmatic functions. Within the passive, there are two further options, namely be-passive or get-passive. While these two forms are generally understood to differ, there is little agreement on precisely how and why. The passiv...

Sentences like these are special insofar as their utterance in appropriate circumstances amounts to performing the action identified by the finite verb. The typical formal properties of such sentences in English include first person subjects, second person indirect objects, a present tense non-progressive active form of a speech act verb and the deictic adverb hereby, but performative sentences...

OBJECTIVE Passive, opt-out recruitment strategies have the potential to improve efficiency and enlarge the participant pool for clinical studies. We report on the feasibility of using a passive consent strategy for a multicenter pediatric study. METHODS We assessed the response to passive and active control recruitment strategies used in a multicenter pediatric cohort study and describe the v...

background & aim : ventilator associated pneumonia (vap) is the most common infections in critical care units, which leads to more length of hospital stay, costs, and high mortality. therefore, prevention is a priority according to clinical guidelines. the aim of this study is determine the effects of passive versus active implementation of vap guidelines on nurses’ performance in critical care...

Introduction: Cigarette smoking affects nitric oxide production. The aim of this study was to determine associations between tobacco smoke and serum nitric oxide metabolites (NOx) concentration. Methods: Serum NOx concentration was measured by the Griess method in 230 nonsmokers, 238 active, 196 passive and 29 waterpipe smokers. Subjects were selected from participants of Tehran Lipid and Gl...

A longstanding question in bilingualism is whether syntactic information is shared between the two language processing systems. We used an fMRI repetition suppression paradigm to investigate syntactic priming in reading comprehension in German-English late-acquisition bilinguals. In comparison to conventional subtraction analyses in bilingual experiments, repetition suppression has the advantag...

This study investigates three factors that have been argued to define "canonical form" in sentence comprehension: Syntactic structure, semantic role, and frequency of usage. We first examine the claim that sentences containing unaccusative verbs present difficulties analogous to those of passive sentences. Using a plausibility judgment task, we show that a mixed group of aphasics performed sign...