Syntactic Theory

Passive

Deriving a Passive Participle

This exercise refers to the section on the Passive Lexical Rule.

Your task is to derive the word chased as given in the sentence

Below, you see the lexical entry for the verb chase. The first version is the lexical entry that contains no predictable information, the second version shows the lexical entry with all the information that is predictable from the relevant type definitions, i.e. the lexical entry including all inherited constraints.

Note that it is a lexical sequence whose second member is of type stv-lxm. In order to construct the word chased that is used to build the syntactic structure of sentence (i), follow the following steps:

1. Apply the Passive Lexical Rule to relate the lexical entry in (ii) to a lexical sequence whose second member is a feature structure of type part-lxm.

2. Apply the Constant Lexeme Lexical Rule to yield a lexical sequence whose second member is of type word, which forms the basis for the word structure that is asked for.

Solution

To see the solutions to these steps, click on the links below:

Solution to Part 1: Lexical sequence of type part-lxm that has undergone the Passive Lexical Rule. Any changes that applied due to the Passive Lexical Rule are written in bold.

Solution to Part 2: Lexical sequence of type word after undergoing the Constant Lexeme Lexical Rule. Any changes that applied due to the Constant Lexeme Lexical Rule are written in bold.