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On the passive existential construction
Author(s) -
Law Paul
Publication year - 1999
Publication title -
studia linguistica
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.187
H-Index - 28
eISSN - 1467-9582
pISSN - 0039-3193
DOI - 10.1111/1467-9582.00044
Subject(s) - sentence , existentialism , complement (music) , verb , linguistics , event (particle physics) , copula (linguistics) , computer science , reading (process) , predicate (mathematical logic) , mathematics , philosophy , physics , epistemology , biochemistry , chemistry , quantum mechanics , complementation , programming language , gene , phenotype
Presenting a cluster of facts regarding extraction, the distribution of adverbs and binding, this paper argues that the passive existential construction is not a matrix passive sentence but an existential construction in which the copula verb be takes a DP complement adjoined by a reduced relative clause, instead of a small clause complement. It accounts for the event interpretation of the construction, a reading that is shared by a matrix passive sentence, by binding of the event‐variable.