The morphological passive goes back to Old English (OE) which formed it either with beon/wesan corresponding to Modern English (ModE) be (Denison 1993: 418) or with weorðan ‘become’, which had disappeared completely by 1400 (Brunner 1962: 286). As Visser points out, the passivisation of accusative objects was already “extremely com- mon from the earliest times” (1973: 2102). Examples include ỵa wổs on gange (Beowulf, ms ‘Cotton Vitellius A. XV’, l.1884f, quoted after Klọber 1950: 70) gifu Hroðgares oft geổhted lit. ‘there was on the way Hrothgar’s gift often praised’. For verbs with a single complement, OE allowed for subjectless impersonal passives with a fronted dative as in ðổm mổg beon geholpen ‘him (dative) may be helped’ (Visser 1973: 2112, my trans- lations). Here, the VP is invariably singular (Denison 1993: 104f).
In this chapter our concern is with passives containing verbs like give that govern two nominal participants. OE had many verbs of this type as in He geaf me sinc ‘He
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Passives of so-called ‘ditransitives’ in nineteenth century and present-day Canadian English 149 gave me something precious’ (Visser 1963: 621), where verbs such as gifan ‘give’, or tellan ‘tell’ governed a dative (beneficiary) and an accusative complement (theme).
Visser traces the direct ModE type He was given a book that typically has the person or theme as subject back to a fairly common OE predecessor which he represents schematically as ‘Him was given a book’ (1973: 2144). Structurally it was a personal passive with a preposed dative and a subject NP (nominative) following the verb, as illustrated in (1):
(1) þa was Hroðgare (dat) heresped (nom) gyfen ‘there Hroðgar was given success in battle’ (Beowulf, l. 64)
Denison (1993: 104) believes that modern passives of the give type had a second OE precursor, namely subjectless, impersonal passives as outlined in (2) (OBJ = ‘oblique case’) and as illustrated in (3):
(2) a. Presents (OBJ) was given her (OBJ).
b. Her (OBJ) was given presents (OBJ)
(3) ac him (dat) nổs getiðod ðổre lytlan lisse (gen) ‘but him (dat) not-was granted that small favour’ (Homilies of ặlfric I, 23.330.29)
(Denison 1993: 108) Note that (1) differs from (2) and (3) in that the latter have no subject and the ques- tion arises whether give-type verbs ever had an impersonal passive along the lines of (2). Denison himself admits that he has found no clear impersonal passive with gievan ‘give’ or similar verbs (1993: 104). Rather, such subjectless impersonal passives of verbs with two complements appear to require a genitive as in (3), whereas verbs like give, which take a dative and an accusative, can only form personal passives (see Visser 1973: 2142–3). I found no evidence in Visser that such verbs ever had an imper- sonal passive. Apart from verbs governing a dative and a genitive, impersonal passives are thus restricted to single-complement verbs as in Visser’s type ‘Gode be thancod’
(1973: 2112).
2.1 Second passives
Second passives such as A book was given him in which the entity transferred (the theme) becomes subject are only positional variants of the OE pattern Him was given a book though him is now simply an oblique form and no longer a dative. Jespersen (1961 [1927]: 302) refers to such passives as “the old construction” noting that the loss of inflections made the old dative indistinguishable from the nominative. Interest- ingly, all of Jespersen’s (1961 [1927]: 301) examples except one from Milton boast a pronominal beneficiary. In what follows, such passives will be called ‘pronominal’ and the term ‘lexical passive’ will be applied to those with non-pronominal beneficiaries.
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150 Matthias L.G. Meyer
A search for passives of give, hand, offer, send, show and teach in Shakespeare’s Complete Works (Gutenberg version) and in the Helsinki Corpus retrieved no second lexical passive in the former and only one in the latter. It is given in (4):
(4) I have eate none but once since I were with you and those were sent a Friend of mine for a present … (Oxinden Letters, 1607–1642) Similarly, in Visser’s list of second passives ranging from OE to 1947 the beneficiary is also overwhelmingly pronominal (1973: 2153).
2.2 First passives
First passives such as I was given a book with the beneficiary as subject can be seen as the successor to OE passives with fronted datives. Jespersen explains the change as follows: since sentence-initial position was the most common position for the sub- ject, the formerly dative but now uninflected complements came to be reinterpreted in terms of the subject (1961 [1927]: 303). He considers this ‘new construction’ to have been “extremely rare before the Modern English period” (1961 [1927]: 302).
Both Jespersen and Denison trace it back to the late 19th century (ibid.: 305; Denison 1998: 218). However, Visser (1973: 2144) points to give, offer, promise and other com- mon verbs as occurring before 1500. The construction has been receiving numerous additions since, e.g. show, serve in the 16th, allow, demand in the 17th, assign, tell, order in the 18th, and afford, owe, pay in the 19th century (ibid.: 2147–2151). The new pat- tern thus gained acceptance although it was still deprecated by language purists of the 19th century. Jespersen (1961 [1927]: 309–310) informs us that Sir Leslie Stephen (the first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography from 1885–91) had told his biogra- pher Maitland that “he had tried to keep out of the dictionary such phrases as ‘he was given an appointment’, ‘he was awarded the prize’” (Maitland 1906: 265, quoted after Jespersen). Kirchner (1936: 1) adds that Poutsma had similarly betrayed grammatical conservatism when he wrote in his Grammar of Late Modern English that “instead of the rather awkward ‘I was handed a note’, the language prefers ‘I had a note handed to me’” (quoted after Kirchner ibid.).
Attestations abound in the 20th century, where they include deny, send and sell, to name but a few (Visser 1973: 2151). Strang, writing in 1970, characterised the construction as expanding by accepting some passives that Jespersen (1961 [1927]:
309) had still considered doubtful. These include he was written a letter, sent a note, telegraphed the number and done any injustice (Strang 1970: 99). Native speaker judgements certainly vary here; contrary to Strang, Aarts & Aarts (1982: 140) con- sider passives of write with the beneficiary as subject to be ungrammatical.
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Passives of so-called ‘ditransitives’ in nineteenth century and present-day Canadian English 151 Denison (1998: 219) states that the construction enjoyed increased popularity once “bonds of prescriptive tradition” had been loosened, that it was more common in colloquial style and would only enter the written language with a delay, thus sug- gesting a change from below. The construction met with some 20th century criticism, such as Henry Sweet’s (1898) and C.T. Onions’ (1904) reservations against it (Visser 1973: 2149f). It was clearly stigmatised earlier as we can gather from John Hart’s Gram- mar of the English Language (1864):
There seems to have been a tendency in the language to allow, in the passive, the indirect object to become the nominative, and let the direct object remain, governed by the verb; as active, ‘To teach grammar to me,’ passive, ‘I am taught grammar.’ Other instances are found in the expressions, ‘I was asked a question’, ‘I was denied the privilege,’ ‘I have been offered a situation,’ &c. This usage is against the genius of the language, and should not be encouraged. (1864: 196)
However, Hart (1864:98) allowed for “some exceptions, sanctioned by the usage of the best writers” and mentions offer (context: be offered a situation) as a case in point.
2.3 Prepositional passives
Prepositional passives such as The book was given to me are characterised by a theme- subject and a PP encoding the beneficiary. According to Visser (1973: 2153) such pas- sives are motivated by the OE tendency “to bring the recipient character of the indirect object into special prominence by having it preceded by the preposition to”. He adds that “the two forms ‘he gave it me’ and ‘he gave it to me’ have gone on occurring side by side till today” and that “this dual usage is retained in the passive”. His examples suggest that the prepositional variant has co-existed with the non-prepositional vari- ant (The book was given him) since late OE (1973: 2152–2154). Jespersen considered the prepositional type to be newer and presents it as gaining ground: “While the use of the indirect object, at first with a definitive case-ending (dative), later without any such ending […] goes back to the earliest times accessible, the concurrent use of a prepositional phrase has been steadily growing since the first feeble beginnings in OE.”
(1961 [1927]: 290).
When evaluating the relative weight of the prepositional, the first and finally the second direct passive in the last two centuries against corpus data (see Section 5), it seems worth noting that the first two are functionally complementary. Where prepositional passives topicalise the theme, first passives topicalise the beneficiary.
First and second direct passives, by contrast, are functionally equivalent and hence direct competitors. Their differentiation is motivated by an increased general demand for passives, at least in scientific writing. This was observed in Atkinson’s study of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society contained in the ARCHER corpus
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152 Matthias L.G. Meyer
(1650–1990). He notes that while in 1775 Joseph Priestley’s “author-centred” style of writing was typical of contemporary scientific writing and remained the norm until 1825, by 1875 a new style termed ‘object-centered’ prevailed. In his 1975 data, the old approach was only reflected in four out of 22 articles (1996: 340). Atkinson associates the new object-centricity with a “highly passivized style” as manifest in a rise from an average of 22.3 passives per thousand words for the years 1675, 1725 and 1775 to one of 36.6 for the years 1825, 1875, 1925 and 1975 (ibid.: 361). Atkinson’s examples of passives suggest that ‘object centricity’ relies on theme subjects such as ‘the area’ or ‘the description’, whereas ‘subject-centred’ style favours active constructions and personal subjects (ibid.: 340). We may take this to mean that the object-centred style calls for prepositional passives since here the theme, the object under investigation, is the com- municative starting point and not the person. Yet the comparison of 19th century and Present-day CanE undertaken here found first direct and not prepositional passives to be on the rise (see Section 5). It seems that, rather than competing directly, first direct and prepositional passives serve different communicative needs, motivating the reten- tion of both.