The prepositional passive in Lexical Functional Grammar

Conference item

The aim of this paper is to provide an adequate analysis in LFG of the prepositional passive, e.g. 'That problem has been dealt with', 'My pen has been written with'. This construction has been examined in LFG before by Bresnan (1982), Lødrup (1991), and Alsina (2009), but empirical and theoretical problems, some well-documented, some new, mean that such proposals cannot be maintained. Instead, I offer an account couched in recent work on the mapping between grammatical functions and arguments (Asudeh et al., 2014; Findlay, 2014a) that treats the defining characteristic of the prepositional passive not as purely syntactic, but rather as being located at the interface between syntax and semantics.

Authors: Findlay, J

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: CSLI Publications
• Host title: Joint 2016 Conference on Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar and Lexical Functional Grammar, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland, July 25-29, 2016
• Journal: Joint 2016 Conference on Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar and Lexical Functional Grammar
• Pages: 255-275
• Publication date: 2016-12-31
• Acceptance date: 2016-04-18
• Event location: Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland
• Event start date: 2016-07-25
• Event end date: 2016-07-29
• ISSN: 1535-1793 and 1098-6782
• Keywords: passive; argument linking; syntax-semantics interface