Passives and Topicalization

Bibliographic Data

ID5268150
AuthorsRobert Grieve (University of St Andrews), Roger Wales (University of Edinburgh), Roger J Wales
Year1973
Volume64
Issue2
Pages173-182
Publication date1973-05-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueBritish Journal of Psychology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0007-1269 • E-ISSN: 2044-8295
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/j.2044-8295.1973.tb01340.x
OpenAlexW1986367822
LanguageEN
Citations received6

Recent studies, suggesting that passives emphasize the importance of their logical object over their logical subject, have employed full passives with both nominals similarly determined (e.g. the Noun + Verb + the Noun). When subjects are asked to indicate the important entity of full passives where the definiteness of nominals is varied, they select the definitely marked nominal in sentences like the N + V + a N, a N + V + the N, and the event in sentences like a N + V + a N. Since these results apply both to short passives and to active sentences, it would seem that the important entity of an utterance is not solely indicated by voice and word-order, but is more closely concerned with definiteness. This is apparently related to a feature of discourse which may be termed topicalization

Definiteness · Feature (linguistics) · Linguistics · Natural language processing · Noun · Noun phrase · Object (grammar) · Subject (documents) · Topicalization · Underspecification · Utterance · Verb · Word order · Computer Science · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Natural Language Processing Techniques · Philosophy · Psychology · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation

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