Junichi Toyota

Fossilisation of Passive in English: Analysis of Passive Verbs

In a historical change of a language, it is sometimes the case that a particular word or phrase becomes associated with only one paradigm of grammatical category. In this paper, one such case involving the passive voice in English is analysed. There are a set of verbs in English which had both the active and the passive form earlier, but became later restricted to the passive form. Surprisingly, these verbs have not been given much attention in previous study of the passive voice. In this paper, an attempt is made to identify some grammatical characteristics in the development of these verbs, termed passive verbs throughout this paper. The lack of previous work is perhaps due to the paucity of actual occurrences. However, the passive verbs can function as an important indicator in the development of the passive in English in general, especially as a marker of the grammaticalisation of the construction. The organisation of this paper is as follows. First of all, the definition of the passive is discussed, since according to authors, different ranges of constructions are considered as the passive in English and following this, a set of passive verbs are identified. There are some basic criteria and only a handful of verbs can satisfy these. Then morphosemantic characteristics are analysed, including subject animacy, transitivity, agentivity, discourse function and so forth. Finally, the historical changes of the passive verbs are analysed in relation to the development of the be-passive in general. The timing of changes shows an interesting pattern, and it is also shown that the passive verbs are somehow related to other changes, such as modality.

Disagreement of feminine gender: historical perspectives

Abstract In this paper, a particular case of grammatical gender agreement system is discussed, concerning the referent of young females or small children. These referents are grammatically treated as neuter nouns, disregarding their biological sex. This is termed gender disagreement. It is argued here that this is due to the older classification of nouns based on active and inactive distinction, stemming from the active alignment. What decides the distinction is the ability to reproduce, which was once a characteristic of active nouns. This criterion has not been given much attention in analyzing modern languages, but it has been very persistent in spite of various sociocultural factors that forced changes in other parts of grammar. Thus, it can be claimed that gender disagreement is a result of a shift of gender agreement criteria and persistency of a specific criterion, i.e., the ability to reproduce proves to be still an important criterion in gender agreement system in modern languages.