I’ve had a few questions about the passive. We went through that maybe a little quickly in class, and a while ago. The main thing to know about the passive is that, in a passive sentence, there is a Pass auxiliary (“be”) which has, as a condition, that the vP in its complement not have a specifier. No Agent. A passive sentence does not have an Agent in the usual way, it is more like an unaccusative verb. So, where John is the Agent and the sandwich is the Theme, in John kicked the sandwich, the passive form can be just The sandwich was kicked, with the Agent removed and Theme “promoted” to become the subject.

When you include the Agent in a by-phrase, you can take this to be a normal PP, just like by the barn would be. Headed by the P by, with a DP complement. Now, a normal PP would be adjoined in the structure either at vP or at TP, depending on what the meaning is. An agentive by-phrase might attach differently; there is a slide on the handout (“Where does the by-phrase attach?” on handout 10a) that provides data suggesting that the by-phrase attaches lower than TP-adverbs and higher than vP-adverbs. The conclusion of this (which was said in class, though not included on the handout itself) is that the by-phrase probably adjoins to PassP, since that’s what there is between TP and vP. I’ve drawn a (schematic) picture below.

For doing homework 7, and just for thinking about recursive possession, you might find it helpful to look at this example tree, for My brother’s roommate kissed Fritz. (posted on last year’s blog).

In class today, I canceled Part 1 of Homework #7 because we haven’t really reached the point I’d want to be at for you to do it.

With this blog post, I hereby cancel Homework #7, in its current form, in its entirety.

To clarify: the task asked of you in Part 2 is something that you can do, and if you are left with a big gap in your schedule that would have been occupied with trying to do this part of the homework, feel free to think it through, because most of what you think about will still be relevant when I reissue the homework. However, to the extent that you are asked to draw trees, I think it doesn’t really make any sense to have you doing that now, given that we’re just about to make a change within the structure of the DPs (to include nPs). Rather than have you take the time to draw trees that will immediately be rendered obsolete in certain details, I’ve decided to postpone this part as well.

What I will do, therefore, is re-issue Homework #7 on Thursday, which puts it at pretty much exactly the right time in terms of the point we are at in class with the material. Due to the upcoming Thanksgiving break, the due date will be the Thursday after Thanksgiving, December 2. I will either hand out a revised version on Thursday if I make any changes, or have you update the due date on your existing copy if I determine that no revision is needed.

Just a reminder of what was mentioned in class today: Homework #6 will be due on Thursday, November 11, a week later than I had originally assigned it for. You can retrieve the updated PDF file with the new due date for your collection, if you wish.

Ok, it took me a little bit longer than I anticipated it would, but I’ve now linked Homework #6 into the schedule.

As mentioned in class, this was assigned a bit prematurely—I violated my rule of making the homework depend only on the classes that happen up to the one in which it was given out; this homework relies almost entirely on what we’re going to cover on Tuesday. The good news, though, is that it’s a pretty short assignment.