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The volume Passives Cross-Linguistically provides analyses of passive constructions across different languages and populations from the interface perspectives between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. In addition to the theoretical contributions, some experimental works are presented, which explore passives from psycholinguistic perspectives.

The passive voice is an essential construction for packaging information. Previous studies observed a trend that academic writing in the late half of the twentieth century witnesses a noticeable decline in the use of the passive voice. Unfortunately, indications of such trend in current academic writing are suggestive and diachronic investigation of passivization in the part-genre of research article abstracts receives little attention. To further attest the trend regarding passivization, this study tracks the evolution of passive uses as well as its relation with active uses initiated by personal pronouns in research article abstracts in applied linguistics. To this end, qualitative and quantitative analysis were conducted on a self-built corpus of 2707 abstracts published in four authoritative applied linguistics journals between 1990 and 2019. The abstracts were grouped into single- and co-authored ones using a self-compiled Visual Basic for Application Excel program and the data were statistically analyzed using SPSS Statistics 17.0. It is found that the occurrence of the passive voice displays an overall declining trend and a significantly negative correlation with the incidence of personal pronoun active uses over the three decades, particularly in co-authored abstracts. Surprisingly, a synchronous dwindle is also detected in the occurrence of personal pronoun active uses in co-authored abstracts, particularly in the latest decade. These findings suggest a shift towards an increasingly informational, efficient and reader-friendly style in abstract writing and give implications to academic writing and English for Academic Purposes instruction.

This research was conducted to scrutinise common errors of 9th graders in the use of English passive voice (EPV), which is a challenging aspect of learning English for most EFLL/ ESL learners. The participants were those who were learning at a secondary school in a Vietnamese rural region. The research analysed the EPV errors in 162 student tests, which include all EPV structures, namely simple passives with 'be', simple passives with 'get', complex passives with 'be', pseudo passives with 'get' or 'have', and stative passives. To better analyse the participants' performance, the test is divided into two main sections: 18 closed-ended test items and one open-ended writing task. The research results showed that these learners made the most misformation errors in both sections of the test. On the other hand, all the other types of errors accounted for the same fraction in the open-ended task, while misorder errors were the least common category in the closed-ended test items. Specifically, omission and addition errors are mainly caused by the participants being careless with the auxiliary verb 'be'. In contrast, the misformation subcategories are much more diverse, with using completely wrong passive structures and wrong past participles being the predominant faults in closed-ended and open-ended sections, respectively.

This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of explicit information (EI) in the context of Processing Instruction (PI) as an alternative to traditional teaching methods. PI encompasses explicit information and structured input activity (SI). However, the effectiveness of EI has been a subject of debate. To address this question, grade-7 students were divided into three groups: the complete Processing Instruction group, the explicit information only group, and the structured input activity only group. Following pre-tests and the implementation of different teaching instructions on English passive voice, the scores of the participants were analyzed for the immediate post-test and delayed post-test. The results suggested that although EI did not accelerate the acquisition of the form-meaning connection of English passive voice, it was beneficial for final performance similar to SI. The complete Processing Instruction, however, proved to be the most effective. This study suggests a possible association between the effectiveness of EI and the relative difficulty of the target item for language learners. Plain language summary This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of explicit information (EI) in the context of Processing Instruction (PI) as an alternative to traditional teaching methods. PI encompasses explicit information and structured input activity (SI). However, the effectiveness of EI has been a subject of debate. To address this question, grade-7 students were divided into three groups: the complete Processing Instruction group, the explicit information only group, and the structured input activity only group. Following pre-tests and the implementation of different teaching instructions on English passive voice, the scores of the participants were analyzed for the immediate post-test and delayed post-test. The results suggested that although EI did not accelerate the acquisition of the form-meaning connection of English passive voice, it was beneficial for final performance similar to SI. The complete Processing Instruction, however, proved to be the most effective. This study suggests a possible association between the effectiveness of EI and the relative difficulty of the target item for language learners. The limitations of the study include the potential impact of uncontrollable classroom distractions, the grouping of participants according to classes without accounting for variations in learning abilities, English proficiency levels, and the potential influence of self-directed learning outside the classroom.

This book analyzes the form and function of the English passive from a verb-based point of view. It takes the position that the various surface forms of the passive (with or without thematic subject, with or without object, with or without by-phrase, with or without auxiliary) have a common source and are determined by the interplay of the syntactic properties of the verb and general syntactic principles. Each structural element of the passive construction is examined separately, and the participle is considered the only defining component of the passive. Special emphasis is put on the existence of an implicit argument (ususally an agent) and its representation in the passive. A review of data from syntax, language acquisition, and psycholinguistics shows that the implicit agent is not just a conceptually understood argument. It is argued that it is represented at the level of argument structure and that this is what sets the passive apart from other patient-subject constructions. A corpus-based case study on the use of the passive in academic writing analyzes the use of the passive in this particular register. One of the findings is that about 20-25% of passives occur in constructions that do not require an auxiliary, a result that challenges corpus studies on the use of the passive that only consider full be-passives. It is also shown that new active-voice constructions have emerged that compete with the passive without having a more visible agent. The emergence of these constructions (such as \"This paper argues...\") is discussed in the context of changes in the rhetoric of scientific discourse. The book is mainly of interest to linguists and graduate students in the areas of English syntax, semantics, and pragmatics.

A radically new approach to argument structure in the minimalist program. In Arguments as Relations, John Bowers proposes a radically new approach to argument structure that has the potential to unify data from a wide range of different language types in terms of a simple and universal syntactic structure. In many ways, Bowers's theory is the natural extension of three leading ideas in the literature: the minimalist approach to Case theory (particularly Chomsky's idea that Case is assigned under the Agree function relation); the idea of introducing arguments in specifiers of functional categories rather than in projections of lexical categories; and the neo-Davidsonian approach to argument structure represented in the work of Parsons and others. Bowers pulls together these strands in the literature and shapes them into a unified theory. These ideas, together with certain basic assumptions—notably the idea that the initial order of merge of the three basic argument categories of Agent, Theme, and Affectee is just the opposite of what has been almost universally assumed in the literature—lead Bowers to a fundamental rethinking of argument structure. He proposes that every argument is merged as the specifier of a particular type of light verb category and that these functional argument categories merge in bottom-to-top fashion in accordance with a fixed Universal Order of Merge (UOM). In the hierarchical structures that result from these operations, Affectee arguments will be highest, Theme arguments next highest, and Agent arguments lowest—exactly the opposite of the usual assumption. Linguistic Inquiry Monographs 58

This monograph investigates how Japanese employs different structures found in the grammatical voice, both synchronically and diachronically. The Japanese voice system, especially the passive voice, has provided much interesting data for typological compa.

This investigation focuses on the structural, semantic and aspectual properties of passive in Mandarin Chinese (MC) and European Portuguese (EP) from a descriptive perspective. The findings reveal systematic divergences between the two systems. MC passives can be overtly marked by bei or remain unmarked, relying on the semantic tendency and semantic role between patient and agent. While agent omission alone preserves the bei-passive construction, the simultaneous deletion of both the agent and the bei marker yields an unmarked passive with fundamentally different structural and semantic properties. In contrast, EP agent omission merely alternates between long and short forms of a unified structure. Aspectually, MC passives exhibit covert properties requiring inferential interpretation, demonstrating flexibility in combining with aspectual particles—a pattern absent in EP's morphologically-marked system. This contrast reflects a deeper asymmetry: MC passives are primarily lexically governed, while EP passives rely predominantly on morphological inflection. These divergent realization mechanisms can be traced to underlying typological differences—MC's topic-prominence and morphological minimality versus EP's subject-prominence and rich inflectional morphology. By examining how these typological properties specifically constrain passive constructions, this study contributes to understanding the interaction between morphological systems, lexical mechanisms, and passive realization across typologically distinct languages. A presente investigação centra-se nas propriedades estruturais, semânticas e aspectuais da passiva em Chinês Mandarim (CM) e Português Europeu (PE), revelando divergências sistemáticas entre os dois sistemas linguísticos. As passivas do CM podem ser marcadas por bei ou permanecer não marcadas, dependendo da tendência semântica e do papel semântico entre paciente e agente. Enquanto a omissão do agente preserva a construção passiva com bei, a eliminação simultânea do agente e de bei resulta numa passiva não marcada com propriedades distintas. A omissão do agente em PE alterna apenas entre formas longas e curtas de uma estrutura unificada. Aspectualmente, as passivas do CM exibem propriedades implícitas que requerem interpretação inferencial, demonstrando flexibilidade na combinação com partículas aspectuais: padrão ausente no PE. Este contraste reflete uma assimetria profunda: as passivas do CM são governadas a nível lexical, enquanto as do PE dependem da flexão morfológica. Estas divergências atribuem-se a diferenças tipológicas: a proeminência de tópico e minimalidade morfológica do CM versus a proeminência de sujeito e morfologia flexional rica do PE. Ao examinar como estas propriedades tipológicas restringem as construções passivas, o estudo contribui para compreender a interação entre sistemas morfológicos, mecanismos lexicais e realização da passiva em línguas tipologicamente distintas.  

The monograph is a contribution to the study of the interactions between semantics, pragmatics, and syntax. Based on British National Corpus and Corpus of Contemporary American English, the study offers an analysis of English causative constructions with intransitive verbs of motion (secondary agent constructions), which have been dealt with so far only partially. The monograph is an interdisciplinary work, bringing new insights into cognitive linguistics (especially in the analysis of a causation of motion) and building on insights from psycholinguistics and philosophy of language. The monograph is designed for linguists and students of linguistics.