Noncanonical passives revisited: Parameters of nonactive Voice
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Artemis Alexiadou,
Abstract
This article aims at offering a novel account of the similarities and differences between get-passives and their be-counterparts. It is shown that get-passives are ambiguous between a passive and an anticausative interpretation. Next, get-passives are compared to anticausatives and dispositional middles, as they seem to share some properties with these two structures. An analysis is offered, according to which get-passives, as well as anticausatives and dispositional middles, but not be-passives, realize Middle Voice. Specifically, get-passives realize the medio-passive interpretation of Middle Voice. Middle Voice is defined as a nonactive Voice, distinct from the passive. These two nonactive Voices involve two distinct syntactic Voice heads that generate middle and passive clauses respectively. Only the middle Voice head can be crosslinguistically interpreted as anticausative, and dipositional middle, but this interpretation is distinct from the passive one.
©[2012] by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Masthead
- The art of getting: GET verbs in European languages from a synchronic and diachronic point of view: Introduction
- Noncanonical passives revisited: Parameters of nonactive Voice
- The GET constructions of Modern Irish and Irish English: GET-passive and GET-recipient variations
- What you give is what you GET? On reanalysis, semantic extension and functional motivation with the German bekommen-passive construction
- The verb krijgen ‘to get’ as an undative verb
- The BECOME=CAUSE hypothesis and the polysemy of get
- Norwegian få ‘get’: A survey of its uses in present-day Riksmål/Bokmål
- Semantic extension and language contact: The case of Irish faigh ‘get’
- Grammaticalization of Estonian saama ‘to get’
- Language-specific meanings in contrast: A corpus-based contrastive study of Swedish få ‘get’
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Masthead
- The art of getting: GET verbs in European languages from a synchronic and diachronic point of view: Introduction
- Noncanonical passives revisited: Parameters of nonactive Voice
- The GET constructions of Modern Irish and Irish English: GET-passive and GET-recipient variations
- What you give is what you GET? On reanalysis, semantic extension and functional motivation with the German bekommen-passive construction
- The verb krijgen ‘to get’ as an undative verb
- The BECOME=CAUSE hypothesis and the polysemy of get
- Norwegian få ‘get’: A survey of its uses in present-day Riksmål/Bokmål
- Semantic extension and language contact: The case of Irish faigh ‘get’
- Grammaticalization of Estonian saama ‘to get’
- Language-specific meanings in contrast: A corpus-based contrastive study of Swedish få ‘get’
