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An alternative view of the English alternative embedded passive

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Daniel DuncanORCiD

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).


Abstract

The English alternative embedded passive (AEP), or ‘needs washed construction,’ is a noncanonical morphosyntactic feature found in some American and British Englishes. It involves a matrix verb surfacing immediately before a participle. Previous research has described this construction as only licit with matrix need, want, and like; however, isolated examples of the AEP with additional matrix verbs have surfaced. These rarely attested instances raise questions regarding the basic description of the construction and how matrix verb availability is constrained, as well as whether the AEP is truly the same feature across AmE and BrE varieties. This paper utilizes a large-scale grammaticality judgement survey to obtain as exhaustive a set of AEP matrix verbs as possible. Results show that far more verbs can be used in the AEP than previously attested. Acceptance is constrained by lexical semantics, verbal syntax, and verb productivity. This alternative view of the AEP as a more generalized phenomenon nevertheless shows a strong link between AmE and BrE varieties, as the constraints are nearly identical across the nations. The findings illustrate how attention to rarely attested or non-attested data can inform morphosyntactic and dialectological research.


Publication metadata

Author(s): Duncan D

Publication type: Article

Publication status: Published

Journal: Linguistics

Year: 2024

Pages: epub ahead of print

Online publication date: 25/03/2024

Acceptance date: 20/02/2024

Date deposited: 19/02/2024

ISSN (print): 0024-3949

ISSN (electronic): 1613-396X

Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton

URL: https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2023-0170

DOI: 10.1515/ling-2023-0170

Data Access Statement: Materials associated with this study can be found at the public OSF repository https://osf.io/75buw/. These include materials and R code for the construction of the bipartite network used to obtain language-internal factors; experimental design and stimuli; raw survey results; cleaned survey results and R code for regression analysis; and cleaned survey results, R code, and zip code/postcode shapefiles for geospatial analysis.


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Funding

Funder referenceFunder name
BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grant SRG2021\210047

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