The prepositional passive as structure-sharing

Abstract

Evidence is reviewed that requires abandoning verb-preposition reanalysis in the derivation of prepositional passives (P-passives). An alternative is proposed in which P-passives are a type of raising construction, where the object of the prepositional complement is structure-shared with the subject of the passive verb. This places the construction within the scope of the Theory of Structure-Sharing (Alsina 2008), which helps explain some of its properties. A proposal is made to account for the phrase-structure of Ppassives and for the crosslinguistic variation regarding the availability of P-passives and preposition stranding.