The Passive Voice and the lexical meaning of the Verb.

There is a close connection between the category of voice and the lexical meaning of the verb in M. E. Verbs of weak dynamic force (belong, fail, lack, own, possess, resemble) are not used in the passive construction because they do not express action and consequently the object to them is not acted upon: the child resembles his mother.

All the English subjective verbs (verbs that combine only with the subject) are not used in passive construction either, e.g. she usually sits here; because the voice member is always combined with object words. Objective verbs connected with the object directly are called transitive and all others are intransitive verbs. Sometimes the English active voice acquires passive meanings: the book sells well. The play reads better than acts. The figures would not add.

Questions

1) What does the problem of the combination b + Ven consist in?

Lecture 8

Verbals

The verbals (infinitive, gerund, participle) make up a part of the English verb system. They have some features in common with the finite forms, and some peculiarities of their own. Verbals are characterized by the categories of voice, aspect and correlation; they lack the categories of person, number, mood and tense.

Their combinability is like that of a finite form of the verb on the one hand and like that of a noun and an adjective on the other. In a sentence verbals may be a subject, an object, a predicative and attribute and an adverbial modifier. But they are never used in the function of a simple verbal predicate (as they lack the categories of person, number and mood) and tense.

The English verbals are the basis or predicative constructions and phrases, which are synonyms of clauses fulfilling the functions of attribute, object, predicative, adverbial modifier, subject. Some scholars do not distinguish between the gerund and participle I as they have the same paradigm (Barkhudarov, Plotkin).

writing – being written

having – having been written

written – having been written

V. Plotkin points out that their plane content and plane of expression are forms of the category correlation (priority – non-priority opposition). All the verbals can occur singly in the sentence and perform different functions or form complexes, i.e. predicative constructions with secondary predication where the verbal is in predicate relation to a noun or a pronoun. Their functions may be divided into the Independent use and Dependent use. In the former case they may be used as subject, predicative, parenthesis. In their dependent uses the verbals modify nouns, adjectives which function as their head-words.