Jed,
These types of constructions quite
regularly teeter back and forth over the passive/adjectival divide. In the case
of participles whose adjectival uses are “gradable,” you can add
material to force one or the other reading:
(1) Everyone was bored by Senator Pouncetrifle’s speech on truffle tariffs.
(2) Everyone was profoundly bored during
Senator Pouncetrifle’s speech on truffle
tariffs.
(3) ? Everyone was profoundly bored by
Senator Pouncetrifle’s speech on truffle
tariffs.
Adding
a by-phrase, as in (1), makes it more passivish;
modifying the participle with an intensifier makes it more adjective-ish. This predicts that trying to do both at once, as in
(3), should produce something that sounds odd; I’m not sure how much (3)
bothers people though. I couldn’t do this with “canceled,”
since it’s much, much harder to be “very
canceled” than it is to be “very unique.”
Frankly, I don’t see any problem
with the idea that people can assign more than one structure to the same
construction without it being ambiguous, but that’s a loaded theoretical
issue.
Bill Spruiell
Dept. of English
Central Michigan University
From:
Sent: Thursday, March 16, 2006
9:48 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Passive voice vs.
adjectival
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)
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