Passivization of ditransitive verbs from the FSP point of view
Vědecký článek
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Trvalý odkaz
http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11956/96452Identifikátory
ISSN: 1805–9635
Kolekce
- Číslo 1 [5]
Autor
Datum vydání
2015Nakladatel
Univerzita Karlova, Filozofická fakultaZdrojový dokument
Linguistica PragensiaRok vydání periodika: 2015
Ročník periodika: 25
Číslo periodika: 1
Práva a licenční podmínky
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/Klíčová slova (anglicky)
passive, ditransitive verbs, presentation scale, quality scale, object deletion, semantics of the indirect object, semantics of the verbThe present paper aims at contributing to the study of passivization of ditransitive complementation from the FSP point of view. English ditransitive verbs generally allow two passive constructions, i.e. the subject of a passive can in the active correspond either to Oi (Jack was sent a copy of the letter) or to Od (A copy of the letter was sent (to) Jack). As the passive usually serves as one of the means used to achieve the basic distribution of communicative dynamism, the choice of the subject and the object of the passive can be supposed to be motivated, respectively, by their thematic and rhematic function. Thus, the sentence is perspectived away from the subject and constitutes the quality scale. The aim of the paper is to verify this assumption and to find out whether a passive sentence with a ditransitive verb can also implement the presentation scale, i.e. whether the sentence can be perspectived towards the subject and introduce a phenomenon into discourse. Attention is paid to other potential factors that might play a role in the selection of the passive, namely the semantics of the verb and of the indirect object (whether the recipient is actual or intended), object deletion (i.e. omission of an object) and the expression of the by-agent. The analysis is based on examples obtained from the British National Corpus.