Chow, Pui Lun: The Malefactive Topic Role in Cantonese Indirect Passives
In this paper, I aim to account for the formation of an under-studied subtype of Cantonese passives, namely the indirect passives. Having examined the indirect passive constructions in examples from a corpus, I establish that the indirect passive subject carries the information structure role topic and this particular syntactic structure is obligatorily associated with adversity. Instead of the patient argument as in canonical passives, a malefactive argument is borne by the sentence initial NP in indirect passives, leading to an extension of syntactic valency. In sum, the indirect passive with the topical part of the patient NP expressed as the subject and the non-topical part remaining as an object-in-situ is an outcome of interaction of information packaging and grammatical relations.
December 22, 2022 |
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