Query Details
| Query Subject: |
Passives, Implicit Agents
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| Author: | Andrew McIntyre | |
| Submitter Email: | click here to access email | |
| Linguistic LingField(s): |
Pragmatics
Semantics Syntax |
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| Query: |
Dear linguists,
A common claim is that verbal passives disfavor interpretations in which implicit Agents are interpreted as co-referent with passive subjects. Thus, (1) does not suggest that Mary is dressing herself (the “disjoint reference” effect). By contrast, coreferent interpretations are allowed with adjectival participles like those in (2) and certain get-constructions like (3). (1) Mary is being dressed at the moment. (2) Mary seems well-dressed. Mary is a well-dressed person. (3) Mary is getting dressed. I would be grateful if people could help me with the following questions: A. Does anyone know of discussions in the literature of cases of adjectival participles which disfavor coreferent interpretations? It appears that such cases are possible once we move beyond verbs like “dress” which express commonly self-directed acts. For instance, my judgment of (4) is that “underrated” cannot have a coreferent reading however much the context favors it. (4) #If I had the choice between people who think they are geniuses and people who underrate themselves, I would choose the underrated ones. B. Can anyone provide me with defenses (or criticisms) of PRAGMATIC accounts of the lack of coreferent interpretations in cases like (1). An example of such an account might be one which treats disjoint reference effects as an implicature (say a scalar implicature based on the fact that the speaker could have signaled the reflexive interpretation unambiguously by using an active construction with a reflexive interpretation such as ''Mary is dressing.''). Examples of non- pragmatic accounts would be ones which make no appeal to implicatures and rely on absolute syntactic/semantic statements (“coreference is out with verbal passives since it would incur a crossover violation”; cf. Baker/Johnson/Roberts, Passive Arguments Raised, Linguistic Inquiry, 1989). Many thanks in advance for any help in these matters. Andrew |
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| LL Issue: | 22.3026 | |
| Date posted: | 26-Jul-2011 | |
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