Author: Junichi Toyota Junichi Title: Diachronic Change in the English Passive Series Title: Palgrave Studies in Language History and Language Change Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Year: 2008
Rose Rittenhouse, Department of German, University of Wisconsin-Madison
SUMMARY
In this book, Junichi Toyota examines the periphrastic passive construction and its historical and modern significance for the passive-voice system of English. His work focuses on diachronic processes that have affected the passive construction's morphosyntactic features and semantic functions. Toyota also locates the periphrastic passive within a wider grouping of structures representing an increased level of discourse prominence for an (affected) object relative to the cause of its affectedness. Over the course of nine chapters, he calculates various frequencies of occurrence relating to the passive and passive-like structures by using combined data from multiple corpora (the Helsinki Corpus, the ARCHER Corpus, the London-Lund Corpus of Spoken English and the Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen Corpus). These data cover the time period from Old English through Middle English, Modern English and into Present Day English. Permeating the entire analysis is the concept of 'gradience' (p. 13) and the argument that voice and its component structures cannot be categorized discretely, but rather must be treated as belonging to a continuous system. The ultimate goal of Toyota's study is to determine how the passive voice has been modified and realized by speakers over the course of the English language's history and to couple the historical data with a modern synchronic description.
After a brief introduction, including a quick summary of different theoretical approaches to studying the passive voice, Toyota turns his attention to the periphrastic passive in English. In Chapter 2, he divides the modern 'be + past participle' construction into a verbal (dynamic) passive (e.g. 'the house was ransacked by gang members' [p. 12]), a resultative (stative) passive (such as 'the window was already broken' [p. 256]) and an adjectival (stative) passive (as in 'the cottage is surrounded by lovely scenery' [p. 256]). He then devotes the rest of Chapter 2 and all of Chapters 3 and 4 to an examination of the development, frequencies and functions of each of these three structures.
Although the adjectival copular construction usually posited as the origin of the dynamic passive (e.g. by Givón 1990:600, 2006) had already begun displaying characteristics of the verbal passive in Old English, in Chapters 2 and 3 Toyota points to Middle English as the time period during which the 'be + past participle' construction underwent its most significant structural and functional changes. According to Toyota's calculations in Chapter 2, although dynamic and stative passives could be identified even in early stages of Old English, the verbal passive did not begin noticeably surpassing the stative passive in frequency until early Middle English. After this period, the verbal passive's frequency did begin increasing steadily relative to that of the stative passive, and Toyota attributes this rise to the gradual establishment of the (active) perfective 'have + past participle' construction, which enabled speakers to more fully reanalyze the aspectual characteristics of the copular 'be'- construction in favor of a dynamic aspect. Toyota argues that once the 'have'- construction could represent perfectivity, then '[i]t is plausible to think that [the emergence of the 'have'-perfect] reduced the association of 'be' with perfective aspect' (p. 48). As a result, the dynamic progressive passive found in such constructions as 'was being debated' (p. 42) and 'are being applied' (p. 43) became possible. In Chapter 3, Toyota compares the diachronic properties of 'to be' in the 'be + past participle' construction with general properties of auxiliary verbs and concludes that the process of auxiliary grammaticalization was completed during Middle English. Additionally, he notes that the past participle lost the last vestiges of adjectival features (such as inflectional morphology) during this period.
After this establishment of the historical foundations of the periphrastic passive, Toyota briefly reverts to a synchronic perspective in Chapter 4 in order to define the discourse functions of the passive. Three functions are commonly suggested in the literature: downgrading the importance of an agent role, highlighting the salience of an object role, and conveying a sense of verbal inertness (e.g. a sense of 'inactivization of the situation' [Haspelmath 1990:59] or even 'stativization' [Givón 1990:571]). Toyota acknowledges all three and initially favors the first two, but although he argues in this chapter for a gradience approach (which should render impossible a clear distinction between any of the three functions), 'impersonalisation' (p. 99), a means of downgrading an agent role, eventually emerges as the primary function (pp. 123-125, 240).
In Chapter 5, the diachronic examination is resumed, and Toyota first introduces his version of Croft's (2001: 283-319) 'conceptual space' (p.138), which serves as a visual representation of the 'voice continuum' (p.137). The conceptual space allows the reader to see how each construction with some sort of passive function fits into the overall English voice system (including the active voice and a middle voice for the classification of structures with middle-voice functions). The verbal passive is the most prominent construction, and all of the other structures are plotted around it. The conceptual space as introduced in Chapter 5 is relatively basic and displays only the periphrastic constructions (including the impersonal passive). After this point, the analysis is expanded in order to include functionally related structures including the 'get'-passive, as in 'John got promoted last week' (p. 157) (Chapter 6). Also taken into consideration are unaccusative-middles (e.g. 'This new car steers well' [p. 186]), unaccusatives in progressive form like 'The book is printing' (p. 188), adjectives ending in '-able' such as 'understandable' (p. 197) and 'needs + -ing' constructions (such as 'This TV needs fixing' [p. 207]), all of which show more of a middle-voice orientation (Chapter 7). Active constructions with generic subjects like 'they' or 'one', as found, for example, in 'One may find it highly amusing' (p. 222), are then addressed in Chapter 8. Inversion, the movement of an element from its unmarked location in a clause to a marked and therefore more salient position, is also discussed in Chapter 8, but Toyota does not consider it in the diachronic analysis due to changing word-order patterns in English over time. What all of these constructions share is the ability to impersonalize the agent.
The 'get'-passive receives extra attention because it resembles the canonical passive structurally and is often considered the result of a redevelopment in English of the distinction between a stative passive ('be' + past participle) and a dynamic passive ('get' + past participle). Toyota argues, however, that the 'get'-passive differs from the canonical passive functionally, e.g. the 'get'-passive overwhelmingly focuses on an animate subject that is more involved in the action affecting it. Additionally, Toyota provides frequencies of occurrence based on the corpus data that confirm Givón's (1990: 623) and Dixon's (2005: 359) suspicion that clauses with 'get'-passives exhibit an agent phrase less often than is found in canonical passives. According to Toyota's calculation for Present Day English, for example, only 3 (1.4%) of the 209 written and spoken 'get'-passives collected include an agent phrase (p. 159). These results are congruent with those of other studies, such as Svartvik (1966:149), Granger (1983: 194) and Carter and McCarthy (1999: 51), which have found a relatively low occurrence of agent phrases in 'get'-passives. Toyota adopts the view that the 'get'-passive was historically a reflexive construction, which distances it from the canonical passive, since diachronically, the 'get'-passive has performed a function more compatible with a middle rather than passive voice.
Chapter 9, the conclusion, synthesizes all of the sub-analyses into one historical account. Passive-voice patterns in Old English, Middle English, early Modern English and late Modern English/Present Day English are represented via separate conceptual spaces. Taken together, the conceptual spaces show that Old English active structures like the adjectival copular constructions and clauses with indefinite pronouns were the first to communicate passive-voice meanings. As time progressed, the adjectival constructions became grammaticalized as passive verbal structures, and middle-voice-related constructions were developed and incorporated into the passive-voice system. The final conceptual space thus shows a passive-voice system that spans the entire voice spectrum in terms of its structural representations and discourse functions.
EVALUATION
This book provides a thorough overview of the development of the English passive voice and its constituent structures and will be of interest not only to linguists working on the English passive, but also to those working on voice in the Germanic languages as a whole. Toyota uses a straightforward tabular format for presenting his quantitative results across time periods, which helps the reader easily track the diachronic changes in the various frequencies of occurrence. The combination of many detailed descriptions of previous theories and Toyota's own statistical results contextualizes his primarily functionalist approach (an approach that is emphasized through his use of Role and Reference Grammar's terms 'actor' and 'undergoer' [cf. Foley and Van Valin 1984]). This way of presenting the data also highlights Toyota's own quantitative contributions concerning changing patterns in the English passive (for example, he calculates the frequency of occurrence of inanimate subjects in the canonical passive throughout all of the time periods and shows that inanimate subjects have increased in frequency since Old English [p. 161]).
The diachronic study is heavily dependent on the three-way distinction between verbal, resultative and adjectival passives. Although descriptions of the stativity tests used are available in the appendix, and justifications are given throughout the book for categorization choices, the reader may at times disagree with Toyota's classification decisions, particularly in relation to the dynamic-vs.-stative division. Periodically, examples of one group can be found which might have been classified differently had a different stativity test been applied. In Chapter 2, for example, Toyota lists this Old English quote as a resultative: '& he his feorh generede & þeah he wæs oft gewundad' ('and he saved his life and yet he was often wounded') (both citation and translation taken from p. 31). This quote may fall under a non-dynamic category based on one of Toyota's tests, the pseudo-cleft test (p. 258) (which only dynamic passives should pass), since 'What he does is (to) be wounded often' is of questionable grammaticality. Under another of the tests, the agentivity test (p. 257), however, a dynamic reading could obtain: the adverb 'deliberately', the addition of which should render a stative passive (including a resultative) ungrammatical, can be inserted into the passive and result in the grammatical phrase 'was often deliberately wounded'.
The motivation for Toyota's layout of the conceptual spaces is also not entirely clear. As stated above, the conceptual spaces place the verbal passive in the center. This means that the active voice and the constructions relevant to it lie above the passive region, while the middle voice and its associated structures lie below. The argument is made that the conceptual space should reflect the fact that the analysis itself is 'passive-centric' (p. 144), but this design, while useful for showing the relations of the various forms to the verbal passive, obscures the relations between the active and middle structures relative to each other and requires the reader to mentally reorder elements in order to properly conceptualize the overarching voice continuum.
Of greater concern are contradictions between the definition of a term and its subsequent use in the text. For example, based on the majority of the book, the resultative passive and adjectival passive should differ because only the resultative passive highlights an affected object. The adjectival passive carries perfective aspect but does not imply that the subject of the clause has been affected by an external source; this difference can be seen in Toyota's abovementioned resultative example 'the window was already broken', where someone or something had to actively break the window, versus his adjectival example 'the cottage is surrounded by lovely scenery', where the scenery is not performing any actual action on the cottage. Thus, the resultative passive should be located between the verbal and adjectival passives in terms of function. The initial definition of the three types of passive, however, lists the adjectival passive as the intermediate form: ''...the adjectival passive is stative, like the resultative, but it still preserves undergoer-orientation, i.e. a causer-causee relationship exists in the adjectival passive'' (p. 13). Not until pages 30-31 does the reader find the definition that will be used throughout the rest of the book: in the adjectival passive, ''[t]he subject is the actor, but the degree of volitionality is quite low and the outer cause is totally absent,'' whereas ''instances of [the resultative passive] are all stative, although some kind of actor is detectable in them.'' Additionally, the clause '[t]he house is surrounded by the forest' is provided on p. 12 as an example of the resultative passive, but on p. 239 as an example of the adjectival.
Despite these issues, Toyota's analysis successfully combines a detailed synchronic account of the passive voice with a plausible diachronic explanation for the modern phenomena. His use of data from multiple corpora spanning all of the time periods of English fits well with the gradient approach and results in a conceptual space that reflects not only the functional relationships of the passive to other structures, but also temporal relationships. Toyota is therefore able to present a full picture of the evolution of the passive and its related structures.
REFERENCES
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Croft, William. 2001. Radical construction grammar: Syntactic theory in typological perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dixon, R.M.W. 2005. A semantic approach to English grammar, 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Foley, William A. and Robert D. Van Valin, Jr. 1984. Functional syntax and Universal Grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Givón, T. 1990. Syntax: A functional-typological introduction, Vol. 2. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Givón, T. 2006. Grammatical relations in passive clauses: A diachronic perspective. In: Passivization and typology: Form and function, ed. by Werner Abraham and Larisa Leisiö, 337-50. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Granger, Sylviane. 1983. The 'be' + past participle construction in spoken English: With special emphasis on the passive. Amsterdam: North Holland.
Haspelmath, Martin. 1990. The grammaticalization of passive morphology. Studies in Language 14. 25-72.
Svartvik, Jan. 1966. On voice in the English verb. The Hague: Mouton.
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