Passives of Spanish Subject-Experiencer Psychological Verbs are Adjectival Passives

This paper argues that <ser ‘to be’ + past participle> constructions with subject-experiencer psychological verbs are adjectival passives, contra the received view that <ser + past participle> constructions are verbal passives across the board. We put forth a battery of morphological, syntactic and semantic tests to support our claim. The divide, we argue, is based on the individual-level/stage-level distinction, rather than on the lexical category of the participle. We provide a theoretical, aspect-based account that generates the distribution of ser and estar in verbal and adjectival participles and paves the way for a comprehensive analysis of the ser and estar distribution across other constructions where the alternation is attested, such as underived adjectives and prepositions.

Not all diatheses are created equal: Evidence from semantic drifts

This paper examines the distribution of Modern Hebrew semantic drifts across four diatheses (voices): transitives, unaccusatives (anticausatives), adjectival (stative) passives, and verbal (eventive) passives. A quantitative survey of dictionaries reveals a discrepancy between these diatheses: Only transitives, unaccusatives, and adjectival passives can give rise to unique semantic drifts, unshared with their related root counterparts, while verbal passives cannot. A corpus-based study shows that frequency is unable to account for this finding; nor can approaches demarcating a syntactic domain for special meanings. I argue that semantic drifts are stored as subentries of the entries from which they evolved, as long as the drift’s frequency remains comparably small. Once its frequency surpasses that of the original entry, the drift is stored as an independent lexical entry. In light of that, I suggest that predicates giving rise to unique semantic drifts have to constitute lexical entries. It thus follows that transitives, unaccusatives, and adjectival passives are formed and listed in the lexicon, while verbal passives are not. Consequently, the lexicon is argued to function as an active (operational) component of the grammar, contra syntacticocentric approaches.

Language Experience Affects Comprehension of Spanish Passive Clauses: A Study of Heritage Speakers and Second Language Learners

Heritage language (HL) learners of Spanish have shown better command with early acquired aspects of grammar than second language (L2) learners, mainly in oral tasks. This study investigates whether this advantage persists with passive clauses, structures acquired early but mastered during the school-age years, with literacy. We examined adjectival passives (La comida estaba servida, “Dinner was served”) with the copula estar in the imperfect, which refer to a description of a state or a final result; and verbal passives with the copula ser in the imperfect (La comida era servida. “Dinner was being served”), which refer to an ongoing or habitual action in the past. A grammaticality judgment task (GJT) testing knowledge of the copulas in different simple sentences and a picture-matching task (PMT) testing the comprehension of the two passive clauses revealed that HL learners’ knowledge of the copulas resembles that of literate monolingually raised native speakers more than that of L2 learners. HL learners are able to integrate their knowledge of the copulas to comprehend syntactically complex clauses, especially in the aural modality.

Spanish participios activos are adjectival antipassives

In many languages a set of adjectives are characterized by their “past/passive” participial morphology. Lexicalist and syntactic approaches to word formation converge on the claim that such adjectives can be derived from verbal inputs with no external argument but never from verbal inputs with an external argument. That is, there are “adjectival passives” but no “adjectival antipassives” marked with the same morphology. I argue that a sub-class of adjectives marked with the “past/passive” participial morpheme –do in Spanish, labeled participios activos in descriptive grammars, should be treated as adjectival antipassives in precisely this sense. I propose that Spanish has an Asp head that (i) is spelled out with “past/passive” participial morphology and (ii) selects an unergative verbal input creating a state/property whose argument corresponds to the external argument of that verbal source. If on the right track, the proposal supports the existence of a typology of adjectivizing heads that are spelled out uniformly with “past/passive” participial morphology but must be distinguished in terms of selectional and semantic properties (Bruening 2014, Word formation is syntactic: Adjectival passives in English. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 32. 363–422; Embick 2004, On the structure of resultative participles in English. Linguistic Inquiry 35. 355–392). It differs from previous approaches in claiming that such a typology must include root-derived adjectives, as well as ‘active (=unergative)’ and ‘passive’ deverbal adjectives.

Passivep and The Distinction Between Eventive, Resultative, and Statitive Passives 1¨

Tis paper focuses the distinction between verbal and adjectival passive sentences. For that differentiation to be accounted for, a previous proposal considering a specifc functional node for eventive passives - passiveP (LIMA JÚNIOR; AUGUSTO, 2015) is retrieved. It is arguably assumed that the approach based on passiveP, besides maintaining a uniform analysis to active and passive sentences (as VoiceP in Collins (2005)), deals well with intervention issues, and is prosperous in addressing parametric variation and language acquisition facts. As far as the tripartite distinction among the different types of passives is concerned (EMBICK, 2004; DUARTE; OLIVEIRA, 2010), it is proposed that a main bipartite distinction between eventive and adjectival passives may be retained, which is here attributed to the presence of passiveP. Concerning stative and resultative passives, an agreement operation between the auxiliary verbs and the participle (LUNGUINHO, 2011) is assumed to allow for different readings to be obtained. A fourth group of passive-like sentences, involving participles, which have lost their connection with their original verbs, is also syntactically distinguished and treated as actual copular constructions.

Idiom storage and the lexicon

Using a new methodology, the paper reports experimental work that sheds light on the organization of the lexicon, the storage technique of phrasal idioms, and the derivation of various diatheses. We conducted an experiment to examine the pattern of distribution of phrasal idioms across several diatheses. Native speakers of Hebrew were taught invented Hebrew idioms inspired by French idioms. The idioms were headed by predicates of three diatheses: a verbal passive, an adjectival passive, and an unaccusative verb. After learning the idioms, the participants evaluated for each idiom how likely it was that it shared its idiomatic meaning with its transitive version. The results show that the distribution of phrasal idioms depends on the diathesis of their head. Subjects perceived the likelihood of the verbal passive to share idiomatic meanings with its transitive counterpart as significantly higher than that of both the adjectival passive and the unaccusative. The findings provide support for the claim that phrasal idioms are stored in the lexicon, not in an extra-grammatical component, since their perception by speakers turned out to be dependent on a grammatical property, the diathesis. This dependency can be explained if phrasal idioms are stored as subentries of their head. The findings also reinforce the view that adjectival passives and unaccusatives are listed in the lexicon, but not verbal passives. Finally, they support the existence of an active lexicon, where thematic operations can apply.

Aspect and Argument structure in adjectival passives

This paper investigates the patterns regarding the (un)availability of by-phrases and agent-oriented modification in adjectival passives in Spanish. Departing from the observation that adjectival participles derived from change-of-state verbs ban agent-oriented modification but those derived from stative causative verbs allow it, I put forth a novel theoretical account that derives the restrictions solely from the Aktionsart of the underlying verbal predicate, syntactically modelled and independently motivated. I extend my proposal to German and Hebrew, which display a similar behavior, and propose a parametric account for languages like Greek that freely allow by-phrases and agent-oriented modification regardless of the Aktionsart of the underlying verbal predicate.