Modeling the Decline in English Passivization
Liwen Hou · ScholarWorks@UMassAmherst (University of Massachusetts Amherst) · 2018
Evidence from the Hansard corpus shows that the passive voice in British English has declined in relative frequency over the last two centuries. We investigate which factors are predictive of whether transitive verb phrases are passivized. We show the increasing importance of the person-hierarchy effects observed by Bresnan et al. (2001), with increasing strength of the constraint against passivizing clauses with local agents, as well as the rising prevalence of such agents. Moreover, our ablation experiments on the Wall Street Journal and Hansard corpora provide support for the unmarked information structure of ‘given’ before ‘new’ noted by Halliday (1967).