Modeling the Decline in English Passivization
- Liwen Hou (Northeastern University)
- David Smith (Northeastern University)
Abstract
Evidence from the Hansard corpus shows that the passive voice in British English has declined in relative frequency over the last two centuries. We investigate which factors are predictive of whether transitive verb phrases are passivized. We show the increasing importance of the person-hierarchy effects observed by Bresnan et al. (2001), with increasing strength of the constraint against passivizing clauses with local agents, as well as the rising prevalence of such agents. Moreover, our ablation experiments on the Wall Street Journal and Hansard corpora provide support for the unmarked information structure of ‘given’ before ‘new’ noted by Halliday (1967).
Keywords: passivization, corpus linguistics, language change, information structure, person hierarchy, hierarchical model, logistic regression, Late Modern English, British Parliament
How to Cite:
Hou, L. & Smith, D., (2018) “Modeling the Decline in English Passivization”, Society for Computation in Linguistics 1(1), 34-43. doi: https://doi.org/10.7275/R5ZC812C
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