Jed,
 
My own sense of the language makes me want to be more precise in the
tense-aspect setting of the sentence you quote.  In my mind the simple past
tense in "was cancelled" seems to be placing it at some definite time in the
past:
He told us that when the committee met the party was cancelled.
This would be distinct from the probable intended meaning of the sentence that
would be more precisely expressed:
He told us that party had been cancelled.
Both these sentences are passives; the action was performed to bring the party
into this state.  However, if the topic and interest in making the statement is
to impart the present state of the party without reference to the action that
brought it about, then the predicate adjective would be the natural
interpretation:
When I asked him about the schedule for today, he told us that the party was
cancelled.
The line between the two interpretations is fine, especially when there is no
context against which to make the judgement.
 
Bruce
 
>>> [log in to unmask] 03/16/06 6:47 AM >>>

Hi all,
   I have a question about the following sentence:
          He told us that the party was cancelled.
 
   A student of mine was analyzing this sentence and suggested that cancelled
could be seen as an adjectival (a participal functioning as a predicate
adjective). My initial response was that cancelled was simply the lexical verb
in a passive voice verb string with was being the past tense auxiliary. However,
I'm hesitant to "veto" the student's interpretation. Not to be too Humpty Dumpty
about it, but is it plausible to say that cancelled functions however the
student perceives it/means it to function? If he perceives this structure as a
modification of party and NOT as an agentless passive, then can I accept and
validate his interpretation?
!   Thanks for helping me think through this!
     Jed


*****************************************************************
John E. Dews 
Instructor, Undergraduate Linguistics
MA-TESOL/Applied Linguistics Program
Educator, Secondary English Language Arts
English Department, 208 Rowand-Johnson Hall (Office)
University of Alabama
 






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