Year: 2017
Type: article
Abstract: A number of languages allow two verbs to be restructured into one complex predicate. When this complex predicate is passivised, the result is called a “long passive”. It is clear that French allows long passives with a small number of aspectual verbs, e.g. Le château n’était pas achevé de meubler, literally “The castle was not finished to furnish”, with a passive first verb and active second verb. However, French also has another option for forming long passives, where both verbs are in the passive form, e.g. Le problème a été tenté d’être résolu, literally “The problem has been attempted to be solved”. These passives are hardly mentioned in the literature, but they can be found in texts. We show that this kind of passive is a part of the grammar of several of our informants, depending on the choice made for the first verb. We argue that the passivity of the second verb should be seen as a kind of verbal feature agreement. Our results indicate that restructuring is a more important phenomenon in French than previously assumed.
Source: Syntaxe et sémantique
DOI: 10.3917/ss.018.0011
Institutions: Linguistique, langues, parole, Université de Strasbourg
Language: French
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2759080442