Dick Hudson (dick@linguistics.ucl.ac.uk)
Thu, 09 Jan 1997 12:16:09 +0000
Olivier Laurens thinks that prepositional passives based on potentially transitive verbs have to be resultatives (see his message copied below). I don't think that can be right in view of examples like the following, which don't seem to allow any kind of resultative reading: (1) This spoon has been eaten with. (2) This page has been written on. (3) This restaurant was eaten in by the President. I suspect the constraints, whatever they are, are the same as for prepositional passives based on ordinary intransitive verbs. > |Do you know if there is anything in the HPSG/GPSG literature about > |pseudo-passives of the kind > | > |1 The plate has been eaten off. > | > |where the matrix verb is transitive? I take it that this ought to be related > |to > | > |2 John ate custard off the plate > | > |and that in some sense it is the custard which comes off the plate, so that > |implicitly in (1), the same thing came off the plate and was eaten. > | > >Looks like resultatives, e.g. [john CAUSE [the custard to come off the >plate] BY eating]. Cf Rapoport 1993 ("Verbs in depictive and >resultatives" in Pustejovsky (ed) "Semantics and the lexicon", pp >163-184, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht). S Wechsler has a >paper about the analysis of resultatives in HPSG. See enclosed message. > Richard (=Dick) Hudson Department of Phonetics and Linguistics, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT work phone: +171 419 3152; work fax: +171 383 4108 email: dick@ling.ucl.ac.uk web-sites: home page = http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/home.htm unpublished papers available by ftp = ....uk/home/dick/papers.htm
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