I had originally looked at Rodriguez’s sentence and tried inserting a ‘very’ before ‘unquestioned’ (since that’s a standard trick for distinguishing past participles used as modifiers from those used as part of a passive). When it “failed,” I put the problem down to ‘unquestioned’ being non-gradable, rather than to it being part of a passive. To me, something’s either unquestioned or it’s not, and I can’t do the same thing with “very unquestioned” that I do with “very unique” (for which my meaning is “unique in a very relevant or dramatic way, instead of being the only person in the room with green shoelaces”).  I fully agree it’s adjectival here; I just thought the sentence pointed out one of the weaknesses of the “very test.”

 

Then I tried checking with Google for examples of “very unquestioned” since I’m dubious about native-speaker intuitions, even when they’re mine (or especially when they’re mine). There are about 245 examples. That’s a pretty tiny set by internet standards, but small and zero aren’t the same (and while there were some examples from non-native English-speakers, that didn’t appear to account for all, or even most, of the cases).

 

Bill Spruiell  

 

 

 

To add to Craig’s explanation, when “un-“ is added to adjectives, it negates, as in “unwise,” “unsure,” etc., but when prefixed to a verb it is reversive, as in “undo,” “untie,” etc.  Here it’s clearly negative, not reversive, morphological evidence that “unquestioned” is an adjective in this sentence, and I agree with Linda as to what it must mean.

 

Herb

 

 

Linda,
    I think you need more than one step in the analysis.

1) Past participles following verb "to be are often ambiguous.  "The window was broken by the tree branch." "The window was broken when we got there." The first seems to me passive, the second an adjective, though clearly an adjective that carries with it some of the meaning we associate with the passive.

2) When we negate a verb phrase, we tend to negate the finite. Your analysis is helpful--"never" might be better than "not", but "not" contracts with the auxiliary--"wasn't ever questioned" would orient toward question as verb (and therefore passive.)
   When we negate an adjective, we tend to use -un, as in "unbroken" or "unlucky" ("The window was unbroken by the tree" seems a stretch. But we could easily say "The window was unbroken when we got there.") "The information from a book was unquestioned by everyone in the class" seems very awkward to me, perhaps because it implies an active process for something that was never even considered as possible by the possible agents.
    In other words, "un" as prefix construes it as adjective.
   But adjectives derived from verbs will always carry some of their verbness, hence the fuzziness.

Craig

Linda Di Desidero wrote:

I don't know whether "unquestioned" is what Rodriguez means to say. When

you think of that word, it is certainly odd in that sentence (at least

to me).

 I think he means 

"The information gathered from a book was never questioned."

And THAT would be a passive.

To say that something is 'unquestioned' strikes me as possibly an

informal use of language (as is Nicholas Sparks's use of past tense).

We can say that something, e.g. authority, is unquestionable, but what

does it mean to say that it is unquestioned? What would the difference

be between 'unquestioned' and 'unquestionable'?  The only answer that

seems sensible to me is that 'unquestioned' is an informal way of saying

'never questioned.'

Linda

________________________________________

Linda Di Desidero, Ph.D.

Director, Communication Studies & Professional Writing 

University of Maryland University College

School of Undergraduate Studies

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