Search Results

This chapter looks at the frequency of coordinate clauses, because-clauses, passive voice, and dislocated syntax (e.g., clefting and left dislocation). There are some age and gender differences but few social class differences. The two social class differences that are statistically significant are passive voice, which the middle-class speakers use more frequently than the working-class speakers, and dislocated syntax, which the working-class speakers use much more frequently than the middle-class speakers. In contrast to the views of Basil Bernstein, there is no reason to believe that there are many social class differences in the use of syntax.

This chapter discusses the morphological typology of deponency. It shows that the theoretical interest of deponent verbs in Latin is clear, and that morphological forms are not simply a blind reflection of the categories they represent. A mismatch between form and function is discussed, and the active and passive voices in Latin deponents are studied. Other sections in this chapter examine normal realization, lexically specified sets, and the lack of a normal function.

This chapter addresses the problem of ergative case marking and transitivity in Samoan, a Polynesian language. It argues that the problem reduces to an independent property concerning the syntactic size of simple predicates and the necessity of the merger of two passive voice heads in transitive structures with absolutive objects.

This chapter develops a typology of the different Voice heads in anticausatives, reflexives, and passives across languages. The role of Voice in Greek-type anticausatives and in Romance/Germanic-type anticausatives, presented in Chapter 3, is discussed, focusing on the question of how to explain Voice syncretism. It is argued that, cross-linguistically, the presence of Voice morphology in anticausatives does not have any truth-conditional effects. This morphology is associated with a particular type of semantically inert Voice head, which we label expletive Voice. A number of restrictions on the Greek passive suggest that in English and German, the head PASSIVE introducing the passive function is located on top of the Voice projection introducing the external argument, while in Greek, passive formation is built on the basis of the non-active variant of Kratzer’s Voice head (MIDDLE, building on Doron 2003 and subsequent work). The properties of Greek Voice are best captured by the underspecification approach to Voice.

Attention to individual words and patterns in word choice can yield important insights into argumentative effects, but what are the words actually doing in a text? Part II takes up this issue by focusing first on sentence forms, beginning with those choices that make a sentence in the first place: the subject and verb. In a first pass, English sentences can be separated into two types, stative versus active, depending on whether they categorize or characterize (typically yoking subjects and predicates with forms of the linking verb to be) or whether they make their subjects agents capable of acting through intransitive verbs or transitive verbs taking an object. Focusing on the subject/verb pairings in a text reveals who gets to be or do what in the universe the arguer constructs. To further that analysis, this chapter offers a semantic taxonomy for the kinds of subjects (agents or entities) that an arguer can use: humans, rhetorical participants, things, abstractions, concepts, and slot fillers (e.g., it is, there are). Verb choices can be analyzed according to the parameters identified by grammarians: tense, aspect, mood, negation, modality, and voice. The often-maligned passive voice is defended here as a rhetorical option. Rhetoricians have linked variables in subject/verb choice to an overall nominal versus verbal style and to individual effects like personification, pairing a thing or abstraction with a verb typically linked with a human, to the historic present, using the present tense to narrate an event from the past and zeugma or to hypozeuxis, the multiplying of subjects and verbs. This chapter includes detailed analyses of passages for subject choice and verb choice alone (in the latter case showing the importance of a progression of tenses) and of further passages from mundane news stories for their subject/verb pairings revealing their construction of a worldview.

Adjectival passive participles typically denote states resulting from the events described by the corresponding active verbs. For a particular subclass of passive participles in Hebrew (the causative-template participles), the characterization of these states always implicitly includes the verb's external argument, even for verbs where the external argument is optional in the active voice. Such passive participles are thus parallel to passive verbs, which also obligatorily include implicit external arguments. Adjectival passive participles in other templates are parallel to middle-voice verbs, which do not include external arguments. This indicates that the structure of adjectival passives is specified for voice. Moreover, the voice specification of adjectival passives is determined by the non-active voice values available to the corresponding verbs.

This chapter provides general advice for strengthening science writing. This advice includes how to trim phrases, write in a straightforward manner, and use an active voice and concrete nouns. Additionally, the chapter examines how to write from a higher level by, e.g., balancing between specific information and general statements, and smoothly transitioning between paragraphs and sections to improve the reading experience and provide a road map for the reader. Finally, also provided is a list of common grammatical errors to watch out for.