PROS AND CONS OF THE ENGLISH PASSIVE
PROS AND CONS OF THE ENGLISH PASSIVE

Summary/Abstract: In an attempt to shed semantic light on a construction which linguists canonically view as syntactic at heart – the Passive – , the author of the present contribution discusses more or less blatant cases of defiance of passivisation, as well as the controversial relationship between coreferentiality and passiveness, in the first section, then proceeds to highlight less usual semantic roles attached to the passive subject, in the second section, with a major focus on the motivation behind them, as provided by several of the most salient researchers into the topic. The final section surveys passive auxiliaries other than the prototypical be, with the author advancing a less rigid interpretation of constructions made up of rival get or marginal become and grow plus -ed forms.

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