The nature of the passive, with an analysis of Vietnamese

• Benjamin Bruening ^[1] ; Thuan Tran ^[2]
  1. [1] University of Delaware

     University of Delaware

     Estados Unidos

     
  2. [2] University of Potsdam

     University of Potsdam

     Kreisfreie Stadt Potsdam, Alemania

     
• Localización: Lingua: International review of general linguistics, ISSN 0024-3841, Nº 165, 1, 2015, págs. 133-172
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • We attempt to clarify a great deal of confusion in the literature on what a passive is, and what counts as a passive in different languages. We do this through a detailed investigation of what has been identified as a passive in Vietnamese, sentences with the morphemes bị and được. We also compare these to Mandarin Chinese bei. We show that these morphemes are not passive at all: like English auxiliaries, they may occur with either an active complement or a passive one. We clarify this point and what it means to be a passive. Second, sentences with these morphemes and the corresponding sentences without them are truth-conditionally equivalent. We show that the extra meaning they convey is a type of projective, or not-at-issue, meaning that is separate from the at-issue content of the sentence. We provide a detailed syntactic and semantic analysis of Vietnamese, and give arguments for this analysis. We propose that there is no movement in Vietnamese, but there is in Chinese, and this difference accounts for differences between the two languages. We also clarify what agent-oriented adverbs of the ‘deliberately’ type show, and draw conclusions about English get passives and tough constructions.