Hi Jed.
Let me give you my take on this, and I
hope it’s accurate.
If we consider that in the Active Mood
version of the complement clause (x
cancelled the party) cancel is a transitive
verb taking party as the direct object, we can safely say that was cancelled is the Passive construction of that active statement.
Another argument against the student’s
interpretation could be the fact that, in terms of semantic roles, party is the
theme of the
verb cancel (i.e. what’s being affected by the verb).
I’m curious to hear other explanations.
-José Santos
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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