Huarte De San Juan,
There are many more structure-dependent relationships in language than can be discussed in an introductory text. In this section we will re-examine some familiar sentences.
Mary insulted Bill.
Bill was insulted by Mary.
The first of pair is an active sentence; the second is passive. There is a systematic relationship between the structure of an active/passive pair :
- The subject of the passive sentence corresponds to the direct object of the active sentence.
- In the passive sentence a form of the verb be appears in front of the main verb, which occurs in its participle from (the form tha occurs after the auxiliary verb have as in she has insulted him; i have taken a bath).
- The subject of the active sentence appears in the passive sentence in a prepositional phrase headed by the preposition by, or it may be omitted altogether.
Here is the phrase structure tree of (1) with the grammatical relations explicitly shown :
Active sentences of the form
Subject V Direct Object
have passive counterparts of the form
Direct Object be V-participle by Subject
where the be agrees with the direct object, which functions as the subject of the passive sentence. The following abbreviated trees illustrate the avtive and corresponding passive structures.
A transformation accounts for part of what English speakers know about the active-passive relationship. It applies to active sentences with the structure shown above, andtransforms them into their passive structure counterparts. This shows that transformations may alter grammatical relations, change verb form, and insert morphemes.
The active sentences are the deep structures. In deep structure the grammatical telations of subject and direct object are interpreted semantically. Since both active and passive sentences have the sema structure, the semantic relationships are the same in both. That is why we understand Mary as the insulter and Bill as the insulted in both the active and passive sentences.
This is a structure-dependent relationship, as all relationships involving transformations are. This may be seen bay making up a nonsense sentence such as
The jabberwocky snicker-snacks the wabe.
and observing that the passive is
The wabe is snicker-snacked by the jabberwocky.
The form of be that occurs in passive sentences in an auxiliary verb. It follows the pattern of Aux when a passive sentence is transformed into its corresponing question :
Is the wabe snicker-snaced by the jabberwocky ?
These examples also illustrate that the order in which transformations occur is significant. The passive transformation must apply first, positioning the was for the interrogative transformation. They could not apply in the reverse order.
