I did suggest that "manifest" is an adjective in

"The Word was made manifest ... "

I don't understand why there would be any confusion about the structure 
here. "Manifest" is describing "The Word", and "The Word" is the 
subject of the sentence, therefore "manifest" is a subject complement. 
The fact that is is a passive sentence makes no difference, as Martha 
points out with IO sentences like "Carla was given a gift" (although, 
for me, the alternative is "A gift was given to Carla", I can't leave 
out the "to" in my grammar).

The relationship between active and passive sentences is not that one 
is derived from the other. They are two ways of presenting the same 
propositional content; the passive structure exists to give a way of 
shifting focus or sustaining topic continuity for discourse purposes, 
or other discourse purposes such as desire to hide the identity of the 
agent of an action, or to encode a proposition when the agent is not 
known or irrelevant.

Upon examining actual passive sentences in texts, linguists have found 
that the great majority have no agent phrase, and the discourse 
motivations are clearly driving the structure choice.  For example, 
Jeanne Van Oosten, in a Berkeley dissertation, analyzed passives in the 
Watergate tapes and found that they occurred mainly for 
agent-concealing purposes.

There are various reasons impelling people to analyze passives as 
derived from actives:

-Actives are more prototypical as sentence types; they seem to be more 
basic for speakers of at least some languages. Presented out of 
context, active sentences are processed more quickly than passives.

-Given this, and the fact that actives and passives encode the same 
propositional information (NOT the same discourse functions), it is 
easy to decide that P's are derived from A's.

- Passive is not favored (note the passive!) by writing stylists,  once 
again setting it at a disadvantage against actives.

-Transformational theories of grammar have proposed that passives are 
"derived" from actives; but the original proposal was not intended to 
suggest that there is any actual psychological transformation going on.

Passive sentences are processed faster than actives when the sentence 
is presented in a context which prepares the listener to expect a 
passive.

And there are plenty of non-derivational theories around -- theories 
which propound that "surface grammar" is the only grammar. This does 
not exclude noticing similarities between sentences in their 
propositional content, even at a deep psychological level. The 
Cognitive Grammar analysis of passives makes clear how this is 
possible: the two structure types are related to each other by the 
similarities in the semantic roles -- patient, in this case. But there 
are two separate structural templates (syntactic rules) -- one for 
passive and one for active. Even so eminent a formalist as Ray 
Jackendoff has proposed that syntactic rules are in the lexicon (that 
is, memorized patterns rather than rules for transforming bases into 
derivatives).

Calling "manifest" a "retained object complement" assumes a 
derivational theory, of course.


Dr. Johanna Rubba, Associate Professor, Linguistics
Linguistics Minor Advisor
English Department
California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Tel.: 805.756.2184
Dept. Ofc. Tel.: 805.756.2596
Dept. Fax: 805.756.6374
URL: http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba

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