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Passive do so

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Abstract

The received view is that the VP pro-form do so cannot be a verbal passive, although it can be unaccusative. I show that this is incorrect: do so can be passive. It can also take a raising to subject verb as its antecedent. This means that do so is compatible with all types of A-movement, although it does not permit A-bar movement of an object. I construct an analysis of do so where it is simply an intransitive verb plus an adverb. Do so combines with a Voice head, which can be unaccusative, passive, or active transitive. The subject of do so is base-generated in Spec-VoiceP, and does not move in unaccusatives or passives. Instead, do so must copy a function from its antecedent in the semantics. The subject of do so can be interpreted semantically as an internal argument if Voice is passive or unaccusative and the antecedent includes a trace, because of the way lambda abstraction works in A-movement. This analysis reconciles the evidence against movement in do so itself with arguments for A-movement in its antecedent. The copy mechanism explains voice and category mismatches, as well as split antecedents and ellipsis-containing antecedents.

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Notes

  1. Examples presented in this paper without a citation represent the native speaker intuitions of the author. Typically they have been checked with a handful of other native speakers.

  2. http://shannaro.wordpress.com/2012/11/30/ All web sources cited accessed 2 March 2018.

  3. http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/when-food-is-family/201208/reflections-the-2012-olympics.

  4. http://www.glahaiti.org/words-of-encouragement-adds-sunshine-to-our-day1.

  5. Quote attributed to Anand Wilder, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeasayer.

  6. http://theboar.org/2013/04/19/denis-avey-believe-or-not-believe/.

  7. Tobias Churton, http://www.bonisteelml.org/invisible_history_of_rosicrucians.pdf.

  8. Archive available at https://web.archive.org/web/20150804171820/https://roadtrippers.com/stories/harvard-discovers-three-of-its-library-books-are-bound-in-human-flesh.

  9. http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/197692.

  10. Corpus available at http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/.

  11. I also propose that researchers start indicating numerical scores where they are available. For instance, a sentence could be marked “1/7‡” to indicate that the mean acceptability assigned to the sentence by speakers was one on a scale of one to seven.

  12. http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/197692.

  13. I have only come across one attested example of cataphoric do so:

    1. (i)

      Having failed to do so because of a space crunch last issue, I must review the ground rules this time. (MIT Technology Review, Nov/Dec 2016, Puzzle Corner)

    This example seems perfectly acceptable, so there must be others.

  14. A logical alternative would be that passive and stative do so are ungrammatical, but can be judged acceptable due to extragrammatical factors. Arregui et al. (2006) suggest such an account of certain patterns of VP ellipsis. I will not address this possibility further here. For some criticism of this account of VP ellipsis, see Kertz (2013).

  15. See also Heim (1996), Johnson (2001). These works all assume that the contrast condition is a matter of grammaticality. I take it to be a matter of acceptability, instead. See the works cited for a formalization of the condition in terms of Rooth’s (1992b) theory of focus.

  16. The reviewer who suggested a dialect difference based on age reports that he or she finds all cases of passive do so unacceptable, but unaccusative do so is acceptable. I have not encountered any other speakers who have this judgment. At present, I have no good explanation for any speaker with this pattern of judgments. One possibility is that, for speakers with this pattern of judgments, the Action Factor needs to be split into two different factors, one referring to eventive versus stative, and the other referring to active versus passive. The latter would not be overridden by the Contrast Factor.

  17. http://www.check-six.com/lib/origin.htm.

  18. http://www.majorleagueeating.com/contests.php?action=detail&eventID=437.

  19. https://beavercountian.com/content/daily/bank-slips-show-3-4-million-unilaterally-withdrawn-by-financial-administrator-lavalle-treasurer-javens.

  20. http://isportsweb.com/2016/02/07/arizona-diamondbacks-projected-batting-lineup/.

  21. Japan at War: An Encyclopedia, p. 170. Accessed at https://books.google.com/books?id=RHXG0JV9zEkC.

  22. http://www.redchairblogs.com/starstruck/2015/04/24/a-cosmic-dance/.

  23. http://www.hitechbloodstock.com/coat%20colour.htm.

  24. Adding a full relative clause in (65) forces these sentences to be monoclausal expletive passives, and not reduced relative clauses (see Deal 2009:note 28), which would require be because they are copular sentences. These are not copular sentences, and so it is significant that get is not allowed.

  25. While I believe this argument for a movement derivation of passives to be solid, I should also note that it would be straightforward to translate the analysis of do so proposed in Sect. 3 to a lexical analysis. Passive and unaccusative do so would simply take an external argument that maps to a logical internal argument, exactly like passives and unaccusatives generally in lexical analyses.

  26. I have modified Kratzer’s denotation to existentially quantify over t. In Kratzer’s analysis, the adjective denotes a set of time intervals (λxλt.∃e,y…).

  27. In the analysis in Bruening (2013), and in the analysis of adjectival passives in Bruening (2014), existential quantification is accomplished not by Voice itself, but by an additional head selecting an unsaturated projection of active Voicetr as its complement. This approach would also be compatible with the proposal regarding do so here.

  28. https://www.thedivorcemagazine.co.uk/do-what-you-love/.

  29. An object of a preposition is also possible, in the pseudopassive or prepositional passive:

    1. (i)

      What was stepped on was done so in a very deliberate manner.

    I assume the head Pass just needs to attract some NP, but that NP does not need to be the object of the verb.

  30. An anonymous reviewer suggests that this base-generation analysis predicts that VP idioms will be unacceptable with do so. Hallman (2013) claims that they are unacceptable. However, it is well-known that idiom chunks can antecede pro-forms and are not limited to movement dependencies (e.g., Nunberg et al. 1994). This analysis therefore makes no predictions concerning idioms, and idioms are indeed acceptable with do so, as in The shit hits the fan with astonishing regularity around here; how can it do so so frequently? Idioms are also compatible with get passives (Fox and Grodzinsky 1998), which were shown in Sect. 2.7 to also have a base-generation analysis.

  31. Another possibility is that traces can be treated as pronouns, as in Fiengo and May (1994). The pronoun can then be either bound like a variable as in (100), or be referential, as in (99). It could also be an e-type pronoun, which might be necessary for certain cases of quantificational objects. For instance:

    1. (i)

      A: Some types of evidence should not be used at trial. B: Even when it’s legal to do so?

    In (i), the interpretation of do so must be ‘use them’, where ‘them’ refers to the types of evidence introduced in the previous sentence. See more on quantifiers in Sect. 3.11.

  32. A reviewer suggests that this approach to do so might predict that Relativized Minimality could be circumvented in passives of double object constructions in a case of a voice mismatch. The following examples were provided by the reviewer. In (ia), the second object of a double object construction cannot passivize across the first object, for most speakers of English. This might be analyzed as a locality effect on movement specifically, and as such it should not hold if the subject of passive do so is base-generated rather than moved. In (ib), the second object is the subject of passive do so, with an active antecedent, and the example seems much improved:

    1. (i)
      1. a.

        *The money was given the children of the orphanage.

      2. b.

        The money that we gave the children of the orphanage was done so with help from a foundation.

    I will leave a full exploration of this to future work.

  33. Houser’s example in (108) is presented as an example of a middle. However, it appears to be an example of a causative-inchoative verb instead. Houser also presents the opposite order as grammatical:

    1. (i)

      The N800 pairs with other devices easily, and I do so all the time.

    This is not my judgment, however. I find this example as unacceptable as Bouton’s examples in (109). Judgments on mismatches with true middles are not clear to me:

    1. (ii)
      1. a.

        Politicians bribe easily, so don’t fail to do so while you’re in Washington.

      2. b.

        They were able to bribe that politician, because, as everyone knows, politicians do so easily.

    I think these are unacceptable, but I will leave investigation of middles to future work.

  34. A reviewer points out that we ought to expect do so to be able to take an adjective as antecedent. There are very few attested examples of this, but there are a few. Houser (2010:49, (33h,i)) cites two naturally occurring examples. One I found on the web is the following:

    1. (i)

      You do more for your team and for your company if you focus on being instrumental—even when doing so requires an unpopular decision or a bit of radical candor.

    A possible antecedent, and perhaps the most salient one in (i), is being instrumental. The reviewer provides the example in (iia), which he or she judges unacceptable. I disagree with this judgment. Such examples are even more acceptable if the antecedent is embedded within the subject of do so, as in (iib):

    1. (ii)
      1. a.

        John was being very polite. ??He was doing so because he knew how important it was for his future job prospects.

      2. b.

        The students who are being polite to the substitute are only doing so because they have been bribed.

    It appears to me that adjectives can serve as the antecedent for do so, but I will leave a full exploration of this to future work.

  35. However, at least some speakers find the following examples acceptable:

    1. (i)
      1. a.

        The restaurants that sell no alcohol do so because they couldn’t get a liquor license.

      2. b.

        The refugees that kept not a single personal belonging regretted doing so.

    In these examples, do so is not interpreted as including a definite description, instead it includes a negative object. I will have to leave a full exploration of quantificational objects to future work.

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Acknowledgements

For helpful comments, the author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the associate editor, Kyle Johnson.

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    Benjamin Bruening

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Bruening, B. Passive do so. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 37, 1–49 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-018-9408-1

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