On reanalysing passives

 Why is "Everton deducted ten points" correct and why was a pedant wrong to say it isn't? (In fact, he was wrong to claim "deduct" is not "ditransitive", which it clearly is.)

The usage the guy seems entirely unable to understand is common in English.

I had a parcel sent
Everton had points deducted

The past participle stands alone with the dative phrase removed, and as we often do with the passive, the agent deleted. This is very common in English. (The removed phrases are "to me" and "from them".)

The speaker then reanalyses the sentence as noun + adjective, a common use of past participles ("she is a woman scorned" feels more like "she is a scorned woman" than it does like "she is a woman who has been scorned".

These formations get very remote from their beginnings as a passive. "I have a spirit unbroken" is very clearly the same as "I have an unbroken spirit" but somehow more "poetic".

This is a longstanding process in English. You doubtless never consider whether "I ate some burnt toast" involves a passive but it's exactly the same as "I ate some toast that had been burnt".

When I say reanalysed, I mean, that as an infant, you remake the "rules" to understand (and generate) similar sentences in a different way.

posted by Dr Zen @ 11:02 am 0 comments