LINB18H3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Preposition And Postposition, Thematic Relation, Lexical Verb
Document Summary
Information packaging: english grammar has a number of ways of packaging information in order to emphasize certain information or to suppress or background other information, one of these methods is, passivisation. Passive clauses: syntactic criteria for subject hood. First np in the sentence, directly before the verb. The cheese stink-s: active subjects = doers. Doer = john (individual described by subject np) Undergoer = the book (entity described by direct object np: the passive construction. Be + past participle of the main verb. Doer = john (individual described by np object of the preposition by) Undergoer = the book (entity described by subject np) Interpretation of grammatical voice: the boy chased the girl. No passive construction (subject interpreted as doer: the boy was chased by the girl. Passive clauses: as we saw earlier, subjects do not always correspond to an actor/doer, consider the following two clauses, bill shot the caribou, the caribou was shot by bill.
