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  • 13 - Developments in the Passive Construction

  • from Part II - Tracking Change in the History of English
  • Edited by Joan C. Beal, University of Sheffield
  • Book:
    The New Cambridge History of the English Language
    Published online:
    23 October 2025
    Print publication:
    23 October 2025, pp 360-390

  • Summary

    In English, either the agent or the patient of an event can be topicalised. The active codes the first, unmarked option (A cat broke the vase), the second is achieved by the passive. This chapter discusses the complex history of the second option. While in Old English, passives were primarily adjectival. From Middle English onward, they became increasingly verbal, coding the outcome of a transitive event, and were used as a viewpoint construction, or to structure the discourse. Word order was also changing, restricting initial position more and more to an ever more versatile subject. The passive, catering for this versatile subject position, expanded to cross-linguistically uncommon forms such as the prepositional and recipient passives, and so did the novel mediopassive. The expansion saw its completion with the progressive passive in the eighteenth century. Special attention is devoted to the interconnectedness of these different passives, and their changing relations.