The Passive and the Notion of Transitivity

Monique de Mattia-Viviès (1)

1 LERMA - Laboratoire d'Etudes et de Recherche sur le Monde Anglophone

The purpose of this article is to show that passivization can be better accounted for when the phenomenon of transitivity, on which it is based, is defined on semantic grounds. The notion of transfer from the subject to the object through the verb, which corresponds to the main semantic component of transitivity, is what makes passivization possible, not necessarily the presence of an object complement of the verb in the active. It appears that the notion of object, which is the main syntactic parameter on which the notion of transitivity is founded, covers very different situations and cannot serve as a reliable tool to describe the phenomenon of passivization. It is only when the transitivity notion is envisaged through a semantic angle that passivization can be accounted for in more homogeneous terms.

Le passif est lié au phénomène de transitivité. Or définir la notion de transitivité ne va pas de soi. On se rend compte qu'une définition sémantique de la transitivité permet de rendre compte du phénomène de passivation de manière plus homogène.

Mots clés: Active; Passive; Passivization; Transitivity; Transfer; Object; complement; Syntax; Semantics

Mots clés: actif; passif; transitivité; objet; syntaxe; sémantique

Domaines: Linguistique

Monique de Mattia-Viviès. The Passive and the Notion of Transitivity. Review of European Studies, 2009, 1 (2), pp.94-109. ⟨halshs-01020510⟩