The canonical passive construction in Arabic and English

Abstract

This is a detailed comparative study into the canonical passive construction (i.e. its verbal representation) in two genetically unrelated languages, namely, Arabic (its written variety in particular) and English. From a morphophonological perspective, an examination of the active-passive morphophonology of the main lexical verb in Arabic and its ‘typological’ counterpart in English will illustrate their essential crosslinguistic variations as necessary preliminaries to further discussion. By generalising across several lines of research, the study will arrive at the general pragmalinguistic definition of the construction in question within the conceptual limitations of the terms that have been used to describe several different types (viz. the ‘personal passive’, the ‘impersonal passive’, and the ‘pseudopassive’). Then, from a principle-based standpoint, the study will seek to reconsider the entire terminological apparatus in this respect, and to account for all natural instances of the construction under discussion in terms of the syntactic behaviour of the internal arguments that the main lexical verb has the potential to combine with. If at least one internal argument moves to subject position under canonical passivisation, then the resultant construction will be termed the ‘dynamic passive’. If, however, all the internal arguments remain in their base-positions under the same condition of canonical passivisation, then the nominal expletive is inserted in subject position and the resultant construction will be termed the ‘static passive’. This dichotomisation between ‘dynamicness’ and ‘staticness’ (a dichotomisation which indicates that there exist just these two types both intralinguistically and crosslinguistically) will therefore be established in order to give a reasonable account of the functional dimension of the canonical passive construction within a particular approach to the potential frequency differences and similarities between the two languages involved.