5 - THE LAMBDA OPERATOR

Summary

The passive

In discussing the translation from English into L_type in Chapter 4, rules for generating and interpreting simple passives were omitted. Although it is possible to define the extension of a passive verb phrase like kicked by Jo as the characteristic function of the set of things that Jo kicks, it is not possible with the apparatus we currently have to link this function directly with the extension of the active verb kick, kicks, kicked. The appropriate relationship between the two voices is that, in the relation denoted by the passive, the entity denoted by the object of the preposition by corresponds to the entity denoted by the subject of the active and the entity denoted by the passive subject corresponds to that denoted by the object in the active. This correspondence was handled in Chapter 2 directly in the translation for the passive rule by switching around the individual constants translating the two noun phrases in the passive rule to yield an identical translation to that of the active. So, for example, Jo kicked Chester and Chester was kicked by Jo are both translated into L_p as kick' (jo', Chester'). Unfortunately, this simple expedient is no longer open to us because of the existence in G₂ of a verb phrase constituent. This prevents subject and complement NPs from being ordered with respect to each other in a translation rule because they are no longer introduced by the same syntactic rule.