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The Autonomous and the Passive Progressive in 20Th-Century Irish

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The Autonomous and the Passive Progressive in 20Th-Century Irish ACTA UNIVERSITATIS UPSALIENSIS Studia Celtica Upsaliensia 5 Karin Hansson The Autonomous and the Passive Progressive in 20th-Century Irish Dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Celtic Languages presented at Uppsala University in 2004 ABSTRACT Hansson, K. 2004. The Autonomous and the Passive Progressive in 20th-Century Irish. Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. Studia Celtica Upsaliensia 5. 176 pp. Uppsala. ISBN 91-554- 5899-8. The present study deals with the use of two Irish verb constructions, the auto-nomous (e.g. cuireadh litreacha chun bealaigh, ‘letters were dispatched’) and the passive progressive (e.g. bhí m’athair á leigheas acu, ‘my father was being cured by them’), in a corpus of 20th- century texts. From this corpus, 2,956 instances of the autonomous and 467 instances of the passive progressive were extracted and included in the analysis. Dialectal variation concern- ing the use of these two constructions is also surveyed. The study explores and compares the use of the autonomous and the passive progressive. The main aim of the study is to investigate the two constructions with regard to their textual functions. The features studied relate to verb and clause type, as well as the measuring of topicality of patients, implicit agents, and—in the passive progressive only—overt agents. The autonomous tends to be used when the patient is topical, or central, in the text. The passive progressive, on the other hand, is mainly used with an overt agent that is considera- bly more topical than the patient. In agent-less passive progressives, patients and implicit agents are equally low in topicality. The autonomous occurs about equally often in main and subclauses, while the passive progressive is used primarily in subclauses, mainly non-finite ones. This difference is connected to the finding that 24% of the clauses containing the autonomous denote events as part of a sequentially ordered chain of events, compared to 4% of those containing the passive progressive. The most salient dialectal variation concerns the frequency of the passive progressive: 73% of the instances of the passive progressive in the database occur in the Munster texts, compared to 22% in Connacht 5% in Ulster. The autonomous, in contrast, is fairly evenly distributed across the dialects. Key words: autonomous, agent, corpus linguistics, impersonal, discourse function, Irish, passive, passive progressive, patient, topicality Karin Hansson, Celtic Section, University of Uppsala, Box 527, S-751 20 Uppsala, Sweden © Karin Hansson 2004 ISSN 1104-5515 ISBN 91-554-5899-8 Typesetting: Uppsala University, Editorial Office Printed in Sweden by Elanders Gotab, Stockholm 2004 Distributor: Uppsala University Library, Box 510, SE-751 20 Uppsala, Sweden www.uu.se, [email protected] Contents Preface...................................................................................................................11 Introduction...........................................................................................................13 1 Background and aim ......................................................................................13 2 Overview of the autonomous, the passive progressive, and related constructions in Irish ......................................................................................17 3 Previous research ...........................................................................................23 4 Material and data............................................................................................37 5 The examples .................................................................................................40 6 Plan of the thesis ............................................................................................41 CHAPTER 1: Method...........................................................................................43 1.1 Verbs and clauses........................................................................................44 1.1.1 Verb type ..............................................................................................44 1.1.2 Clause type ...........................................................................................46 1.1.3 Subclause structure...............................................................................48 1.2 Patients and agents ......................................................................................50 1.2.1 Type of overt element...........................................................................51 1.2.2 Given vs. new .......................................................................................54 1.2.3 Recoverability ......................................................................................55 1.2.4 Continuity.............................................................................................58 1.2.5 Co-reference with active subject ..........................................................62 CHAPTER 2: Verbs and clauses ..........................................................................65 2.1 Introduction.................................................................................................65 2.2 Features common to both the autonomous and the passive progressive ....66 2.2.1 Verb type ..............................................................................................66 2.2.2 Clause type ...........................................................................................70 2.3 The variable specific to the passive progressive: subclause structure ........74 2.4 Summary of the results regarding verbs and clauses ..................................77 CHAPTER 3: Patients and agents ........................................................................79 3.1 Introduction.................................................................................................79 3.2 Variables pertaining to patients and overt agents .......................................81 3.2.1 Type of overt element...........................................................................81 3.2.2 Given vs. new .......................................................................................83 3.3 Recoverability of implicit agents ................................................................85 3.4 Variables concerning overt as well as implicit patients and agents............90 3.4.1 Continuity.............................................................................................90 3.4.2 Co-reference with active subject ..........................................................98 3.5 Agented vs. agent-less passive progressives.............................................101 3.6 Summary ...................................................................................................103 CHAPTER 4: Dialectal variation .......................................................................107 4.1 Introduction...............................................................................................107 4.2 Verbs and clauses......................................................................................109 4.3 Patients and agents ....................................................................................114 4.3.1 The autonomous .................................................................................114 4.3.2 The passive progressive......................................................................118 4.4 Summary ...................................................................................................123 CHAPTER 5: The autonomous and the passive progressive from a contextual perspective: a closer look..................................................................125 5.1 Introduction...............................................................................................125 5.1.1 Text function in relation to the eventline ...........................................128 5.1.2 Personal perspective...........................................................................130 5.1.3 Level of participation .........................................................................131 5.2 Material and principles of classification ...................................................131 5.3 Results of the subset analysis....................................................................139 5.3.1 Text function in relation to the eventline ...........................................139 5.3.1.1 Classification of clauses containing supporting material................141 5.3.2 Personal perspective...........................................................................142 5.3.4 Level of participation .........................................................................145 5.4 Discussion .................................................................................................149 5.5 Summary ...................................................................................................152 Summary and conclusions ..................................................................................155 Bibliography .......................................................................................................163 Appendix.............................................................................................................167 Index ...................................................................................................................174 Tables 1 Research studies on the autonomous and the passive progressive ............29
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