246 Chapter 15 Information packaging in the clause(a) Bare passives as complement in complex catenatives
A few verbs that occur in the complex catenative construction - the one with an
'intervening NP' (Ch. 13, §4.3) - license bare passives as complement. They
include have, get (in a different use from that of get-passives), order, and certain
sense verbs, such as see:
[18] We had the documents checked by a lawyer.
ii Yo u should Ulyourselfvaccinated a�ainst measles.
iii She ordered the records destroyed.
iv He saw his son knocked down by a bus.(b) Bare passives as modifier
As modifiers, bare passives function in the structure of NPs:
[1 9 ] We want [a house built after^1990 ].
ii [The complaint made by her lawyer] is being investigated.These are comparable to relative clauses in be-passive form: a house which was
built after 1990; the complaint that was made by her lawyer.
2.9 Adjectival passives
Be can be followed by an adjective, and sometimes an adjective is
formed from the past participle of a verb. This case must be distinguished from the
be-passive. We can see this from the ambiguity of examples like [20], which can be
either:
[20] a. Her leg was broken. b. They were married.
As a passive clause, [a] describes an event, as in Her leg was broken in a hockey
accident. But it can also be a complex-intransitive clause - an intransitive
clause containing a predicative complement, as in Her leg was sore. In this inter
pretation, [a] describes a state resulting from an earlier event: She was using
crutches because her leg was broken. Here we say that broken (not the whole
clause) is an adjectival passive.
The be-passive reading of [b] also involves an event, as in Th ey were married in
the College Chapel, but the complex-intransitive interpretation describes a state
resulting from a prior event, as in They were still happily married.The key syntactic difference between the constructions is that THE ADJECTIVAL
PASSIVE CAN OCCUR WITH COMPLEX-INTRANSITIVE VERBS OTHER THAN BE:
[21] a. Her leg fe lt broken. b. They stayed married.
Here broken and married have only their adjectival, state interpretation.