Noncanonical passives revisited: Parameters of nonactive Voice

Abstract

This article aims at offering a novel account of the similarities and differences between get-passives and their be-counterparts. It is shown that get-passives are ambiguous between a passive and an anticausative interpretation. Next, get-passives are compared to anticausatives and dispositional middles, as they seem to share some properties with these two structures. An analysis is offered, according to which get-passives, as well as anticausatives and dispositional middles, but not be-passives, realize Middle Voice. Specifically, get-passives realize the medio-passive interpretation of Middle Voice. Middle Voice is defined as a nonactive Voice, distinct from the passive. These two nonactive Voices involve two distinct syntactic Voice heads that generate middle and passive clauses respectively. Only the middle Voice head can be crosslinguistically interpreted as anticausative, and dipositional middle, but this interpretation is distinct from the passive one.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 50 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.