Title The Syntax of Passive Constructions Author(s) Honda, Takahiro Citation Issue Date Text Version ETD URL http://hdl.handle.net/11094/25158 DOI rights Note Osaka University Knowledge Archive : OUKA https://ir.library.osaka-u.ac.jp/ Osaka University The Syntax of Passive Constructions A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Award of the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy from Osaka University by Takahiro Honda, B.A., M.A. December 2012 To my parents, Takaaki and Ake Honda Acknowledgements This doctoral dissertation is an extensively revised version of my preliminary doctoral thesis submitted to Osaka University in November 2011. I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Professor Yukio Oba, who introduced me to linguistics, and Professor Sadayuki Okada, for helping me with all the chapters and giving me the chance to write this thesis. I am also grateful to Professor Koji Fujita at Kyoto University, who generously answered my silly questions via e-mail. My hearty thanks also go to Assistant Professor Mayumi Yoshimoto, who gave me some helpful advice and assisted me with my research. In addition to the abovementioned four, I would like to thank the following people for their critical comments and encouragement: Koji Shimamura, Yusuke Minami, Eri Tanaka, Hiroki Shinohara, Hideharu Tanaka, Yusuke Imanishi, Kazuhisa Murata, Maiko Yamaguchi, Yusuke Hiramatsu, and graduate students I spent time with at Osaka University. i Table of Contents 1. Introduction ................................................................................ 1 1.1. Background ............................................................................ 1 1.2. Organization ........................................................................... 4 2. Accusative Case and the Transitive Light verb in Passive Constructions .................................................................................. 6 2.1. Introduction ............................................................................ 6 2.2. Some Differences between Passives and Unaccusatives ............. 9 2.2.1. Implication of an External Argument ................................. 9 2.2.2. Accusative Case Assignment ........................................... 13 2.2.2.1. The Passive of the DOC ............................................... 13 2.2.2.2. The Passive of the Possessor-Raising Construction ........ 19 2.2.2.3. The Ukrainian Passive .................................................. 21 2.3. Proposal ............................................................................... 22 2.3.1. The Structure of Passives ................................................ 22 2.3.2. Two Chains .................................................................... 28 2.4. Some Consequences .............................................................. 32 2.4.1. Presence of an Implicit Argument .................................... 32 2.4.2. Absence of Passive Unaccusative ..................................... 33 2.4.3. v* and Accusative Case Assignment ................................. 35 2.4.3.1. The Passive of the DOC ............................................... 35 2.4.3.1.1. The Structure of the Passive DOC .............................. 38 2.4.3.1.2. The Case of DO: Inherent vs. Structural ..................... 40 2.4.3.2. The Passive of the Possessor-Raising Construction ........ 42 ii 2.4.3.3. The Ukrainian Passive .................................................. 45 2.5. SPEC-v* and Expletives ........................................................ 48 2.6. Further Issues ....................................................................... 52 2.6.1. Three Types of Light Verb .............................................. 53 2.6.2. The Difference between English Passives and Japanese Passives .................................................................................. 54 2.6.3. The have Passive ............................................................ 57 2.7. Conclusion ........................................................................... 60 Appendix to Chapter 2: A Recent Approach to the Passive ............. 61 3. On the Passivizability of Idioms in English and Japanese .......... 65 3.1. Introduction .......................................................................... 65 3.2. Passivizable and Unpassivizable Idioms ................................. 69 3.2.1. Type I Idioms ................................................................. 71 3.2.2. Type II Idioms ................................................................ 74 3.3. Some Cases Where Type II Idioms Can Passivize .................... 76 3.4. The Focus-Agreement Parameter and the EPP on T .................. 80 3.4.1. A-Movement in Japanese ................................................. 81 3.4.2. Topic and Focus ............................................................. 83 3.4.3. +focus in Japanese .......................................................... 85 3.5. Proposal ............................................................................... 88 3.6. Some Exceptions ................................................................... 98 3.6.1. Possessor-Raising Constructions ...................................... 98 3.6.2. Unaccusative Idioms ..................................................... 101 3.7. Conclusion ......................................................................... 104 iii 4. On Pseudopassives and the Case Assignment of P .................... 106 4.1. Introduction ........................................................................ 106 4.2. Pseudopassives and Peculiar Passives ................................... 111 4.2.1. Takami (1992) .............................................................. 111 4.2.2. Kageyama and Ura (2002) ............................................. 113 4.3. Against Reanalysis .............................................................. 116 4.3.1. Baltin and Postal (1996) ................................................ 116 4.3.2. Inada (1981) ................................................................. 118 4.4. Proposal ............................................................................. 120 4.4.1. The Case Assignment of Prepositions ............................. 121 4.4.2. Deriving the Passive ..................................................... 122 4.4.3. Non-Existent Pseudopassives ......................................... 125 4.4.4. Languages That Do Not Allow Pseudopassives ............... 128 4.5. Some Consequences ............................................................ 129 4.6. On P-Stranding under Ā-Movement ...................................... 149 4.7. Languages That Disallow P-stranding ................................... 151 4.8. Conclusion ......................................................................... 156 5. On the Passivizability of Perception and Causative Verbs ........ 158 5.1. Introduction ........................................................................ 158 5.2. Previous Analyses ............................................................... 160 5.2.1.1. Review of Hornstein et al. (2008) ............................... 160 5.2.1.2. Examination of Hornstein et al. (2008) ........................ 167 5.2.2.1. Review of Felser (1998) ............................................. 168 iv 5.2.2.2. Examination of Felser (1998) ...................................... 174 5.2.3.1. Review of Basilico (2003) .......................................... 177 5.2.3.2. Examination of Basilico (2003) ................................... 187 5.3. Proposal ............................................................................. 189 5.4. What Looks like the Passive Counterpart .............................. 191 5.5. Conclusion ......................................................................... 198 6. Concluding Remarks ................................................................ 199 References ................................................................................... 202 v CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION 1. Introduction This thesis presents an analysis of passive constructions in the Minimalist Program. Through a study of the Double Object Construction, the Possessor-Raising Construction, the passivization of idioms, the pseudopassive, and perception and causative verbs, I clarify how passive sentences are derived. Passivization is one of the most famous syntactic phenomena, but we have yet to find a satisfactory account of its syntactic structure: indeed, it has proven very difficult to present a uniform theory to account for the wide variety of passive constructions. In this study, I adopt the Minimalist Program framework, especially the phase-based framework (see Chomsky (2000, 2001, 2004, 2008)), and I propose a syntactic structure of passives that can explain various phenomena in passive constructions. 1.1. Background In an active transitive sentence, the external argument is the subject, and the internal argument appears as the object, as in (1). (1) John kissed Mary. On the other hand, in a passive sentence, the internal argument becomes the subject, and the external argument appears with the preposition by as an adjunct phrase. In addition, the passive morpheme is attached to the verb in passives, as illustrated in (2). 1 (2) Mary was kissed by John. Thus, passivization seems to be a simple phenomenon in which the internal argument becomes the subject of a sentence. At this point, we cannot tell whether passivization is a lexical