See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/324891429

The “Concealed Passive” Construction Needs

Investigating Diachronically

Article · April 2018

DOI: 10.17002/sil..47.201804.143

CITATIONS READS
0 136

1 author:

Jungsoo Kim
Kyung Hee University
6 PUBLICATIONS   0 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE

All content following this page was uploaded by Jungsoo Kim on 12 December 2019.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

 143

http://dx.doi.org/10.17002/sil..47.201804.143

The “Concealed Passive” Construction Needs

Investigating Diachronically*7

Jungsoo Kim
(Kyung Hee University)

Jungsoo Kim (2018), The “Concealed Passive” Construction

Needs Investigating Diachronically. Studies in Linguistics 47,
143-165. Although the so-called concealed passive construction
has been mentioned in several grammar books, its grammatical
properties have not been explored in detail and its historical
development has not been discussed either. This paper, based
on historical corpus data, examines how the construction has
developed since the late modern English period and how its
grammatical properties have been related to those of other
passive-(related) constructions such as the canonical be-passive,
passival, middle, and need/want + passive VP constructions in
terms of licensing verb types, (dis)-preference for agent
by-phrases, animacy of the subject, and productivity of VP
complement types. The findings here show 1) that need and
want have been the two most representative licensing verbs for
the concealed passive construction since the late modern
English period and their relative power changed in the
present-day English period; 2) it is also unique in that it has
undergone different developmental change from the other
passive-(related) constructions; 3) its development could
contribute to the emergence/development of the need/want +

* I am grateful to the three anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions

and comments on the earlier version of this paper. All errors are mine, of course.

경희대학교 | IP: 163.***.18.29 | Accessed 2018/11/02 10:01(KST)

144 Jungsoo Kim

VP passive construction. (Kyung Hee University)

Key Words: concealed passive, diachronic change, late modern

English, passive-(related) constructions, present-
day English

1. Introduction

Present-Day English (PDE) employs the so-called “concealed passive”

construction, as exemplified in (1):

(1) a. The house needs painting. (Huddleston & Pullum, 2002)

b. These books want taking back to the library. (Huddleston &
Pullum, 2002)

One salient syntactic property of the concealed passive construction is that

it involves a combination of a limited set of verbs and their complement
headed by an -ing form.1 On the other hand, one noticeable semantic property
of the construction is that it invokes a passive interpretation, despite the
absence of an overt passive verb form. Thus, the surface subject is interpreted
as the patient (or the undergoer) of the event denoted by the -ing phrase and
the examples in (1) can be paraphrased as in (2):

(2) a. The house needs to be painted.

b. These books want to be taken back to the library.

In each of these examples, the -ing form in the concealed passive construction
is realized as the corresponding passive verb form preceded by to be. In this

1
Visser (1963-1973) lists 22 verbs that have historically licensed this construction
and they are abide, avoid, await, bear, continue, deserve, desire, escape, fear, hate,
lack, merit, miss, mot, need, prefer, repay, require, stand, suffer, and want.

경희대학교 | IP: 163.***.18.29 | Accessed 2018/11/02 10:01(KST)

 The “Concealed Passive” Construction Needs Investigating Diachronically 145

regard, these examples observe the constraint on the canonical be-passive

construction.
Furthermore, in some varieties of English need and want take a passive
verb phrase (VP) as their complement (Murray, Frazer, & Simon, 1996;
Murray & Simon, 1999). In such varieties the concealed passive construction
examples in (1) are also paraphrased as in (3):

(3) a. The house needs painted.

b. These books want taken back to the library.

Therefore, the varieties that employ the need/want + passive VP construction

potentially have three available ways of expressing the same passive meaning.
Notice at this point that it is not only the concealed passive construction
that involves this kind of active form vs. passive meaning asymmetry. In fact,
the middle construction and the passival construction also show this voice
inconsistency between form and meaning, as illustrated in (4):

(4) a. The book sells well. (middle construction)

b. The house is building. (passival construction)

In these examples, there is no overt passive verb form but they induce passive
interpretations. One thing to note here is that the middle construction has still
survived in PDE and can be productively used; on the other hand, the passival
construction is no longer productively used in PDE as the introduction and
spread of the progressive passive construction (e.g., The house is being built
for (4b)) in the second half of the 18th century resulted in the decline of
its use (Buyssens, 1979; Hundt, 2004; Smitterberg, 2005; Warner, 1995).
In this respect, this paper aims to investigate based on corpus data how
the concealed passive construction has diachronically developed from the late
modern English period to present day, and whether and how its development
has been linked to other passive-(related) constructions such as the canonical
be-passive, middle, passival, and need/want + passive VP constructions.

경희대학교 | IP: 163.***.18.29 | Accessed 2018/11/02 10:01(KST)

146 Jungsoo Kim

The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 discusses how

the concealed passive construction has been analyzed in the previous
literature. Section 3 explains how the relevant corpus data have been collected
for this study. Section 4 provides an analysis of how the concealed passive
construction has developed from 1710 to present day based upon empirical
data extracted from the CLMET 3.0 (The Corpus of Late Modern English
Texts, version 3.0) and the BYU-BNC (Brigham Young University British
National Corpus) fiction register. In particular, grammatical properties of the
concealed passive construction are to be compared to the alleged properties
of not only the canonical be-passive construction, but also the middle
construction and the passival construction, both of which exhibit active
form/passive meaning asymmetry. Section 5 explores the relation of the
concealed passive construction to the need/want + passive VP construction
in their historical development. Section 6 summarizes the observations and
concludes this paper.

2. Previous Studies

The concealed passive construction has been mentioned in various

descriptive grammar books and some of them present some historical data
(Huddleston & Pullum, 2002; Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, & Svartvik, 1985;
Visser, 1963-1973 and the references therein). However, none of them
provides an account of how the construction came into existence and how
it has diachronically evolved. As far as I am aware, Toyota (2006) is the
only corpus-based study which touches upon the diachronic development of
the concealed passive construction. However, the data size it is based upon
for the analysis is too small and historical examples are gleaned rather
haphazardly just from Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and Visser
(1963-1973) (only 14 examples in PDE and no earlier example on his own).
Needless to say, this does not offer a plausible diachronic analysis of the
concealed passive construction. Therefore, a larger and balanced diachronic
corpus-based study is required to better account for the development of the

경희대학교 | IP: 163.***.18.29 | Accessed 2018/11/02 10:01(KST)

 The “Concealed Passive” Construction Needs Investigating Diachronically 147

concealed passive construction.

3. Data Collection

For this study, data were collected from two sources: one is the Corpus
of Late Modern English Texts, version 3.0 (CLMET 3.0) and the other is
the fiction genre of the Brigham Young University British National Corpus
(BYU-BNC).2 The CLMET 3.0 consists of 34 million words from 333
different British English texts and the corpus texts are mainly from the
following five genres: narrative fiction, narrative non-fiction, drama, letters,
and treatise, in addition to a number of unclassified texts. The make-up of
the corpus, which is divided into three different sub-periods, is summarized
in Table 1 below:

Table 1. The make-up of the CLMET 3.0

Sub-period # of authors # of texts # of words
1710-1780 51 88 10,480,431
1780-1850 70 99 11,285,587
1850-1920 91 146 12,620,207
Total 212 333 33,386,225

In order to collect concealed passive construction data from this corpus,

first all the combinations of each variant of the 22 verbs listed in Visser
(1963-1973) and an -ing form were collected. In doing so, all the .txt files
of the corpus were combined into one big .txt file and all such combinations
were manually searched for. Then, all the irrelevant data such as (5) were
filtered out.

(5) a. Few governments will bear being examined so rigorously. (CLMET

3.0, 1739-40, Hume)
b. Seated on it, I could not avoid noting an obvious remark. (CLMET

2 The BYU-BNC is freely available at http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/.

경희대학교 | IP: 163.***.18.29 | Accessed 2018/11/02 10:01(KST)

148 Jungsoo Kim

3.0, 1796, Wollstonecraft)

c. All our eyes were turned to Mrs. Field, who fortunately, being
deaf, did not hear his remarks; but continued smiling approval.
(CLMET 3.0, 1988-89, Grossmith)

In (5a) bear takes an -ing VP complement introduced by being which in turn

selects for a passive VP. In (5b) although avoid selects for an -ing VP
complement, it does not give rise to a passive interpretation; instead, it
invokes an active interpretation and this is also shown by the presence of
the noun phrase (NP) object of noting (i.e., an obvious remark). Meanwhile,
in (5c) the -ing form itself does not introduce a complement of continued;
rather, it functions to modify the following nominal approval. This data
collection and filtering-out process yielded 254 relevant concealed passive
construction examples from the CLMET 3.0 for the late modern English
period.
A similar procedure applied in order to collect PDE concealed passive
construction examples from the BYU-BNC fiction register, which consists of
approximately 16 million words (precisely, 15,909,312 words) of British
English fiction texts from 1980s to 1993. First, using the web-interface all
the combinations of the lemmas of the 22 verbs in Visser’s (1963-1973) list
and -ing forms were searched for. After this exhaustive extraction of such
combinations, any irrelevant examples were weeded out manually. This data
collection and filtering-out method produced 355 relevant concealed passive
construction examples from the BYU-BNC fiction register for the PDE
period. Therefore, a total of 609 concealed passive construction examples
were extracted from the two corpus sources and they were used for the
analysis in this paper.

4. Analysis

4.1. Licensing verbs and frequencies

경희대학교 | IP: 163.***.18.29 | Accessed 2018/11/02 10:01(KST)

 The “Concealed Passive” Construction Needs Investigating Diachronically 149

Let us first consider the frequencies of the concealed passive construction

in the CLMET 3.0 and BYU-BNC fiction register in more detail. Table 2
shows the raw and normalized frequencies (per million words) of the
concealed passive construction examples from four different sub-periods.3

Table 2. Frequencies of the concealed passive construction examples in the studied

corpora
Frequency per million
Sub-period Raw frequency
words
1710-1780 38 3.6
1780-1850 56 5.0
1850-1920 160 12.7
1980s-1993 355 22.3
Total 609 12.4

As can be observed here, the frequency of the concealed passive construction

began to increase quite significantly from the mid-19th century. At this
juncture, let us look at which verbs have been used to license the concealed
passive construction from 1710 to present day, and how frequently. The
following lists the verb types in the concealed passive construction that were
found in the CLMET 3.0 and the BYU-BNC fiction register and their
frequencies.

(6) a. 1710-1780 (total: 9 verb types, 38 instances): bear 7; continue 1;

3 An anonymous reviewer asks if there is any validity or reason for why the

studied corpora are divided into four different sub-periods as shown in the tables
throughout the paper. As discussed in Section 3, the CLMET 3.0 is by itself divided
into three groups depending on sub-periods with each having 70 years of time span
and almost the equal corpus size. Considering the data size of each sub-period corpus
in the CLMET 3.0 and its text genres, I chose the BYU-BNC fiction register for
present-day English data. The same reviewer also points out that the period from 1920
to 1980 is missing for the data analysis. I believe that the data from the BYU-BNC
fiction register between 1980s and 1993 represent the present-day English well
enough, although I admit that the data from the missing period could provide a clearer
picture of how the construction has historically changed.

경희대학교 | IP: 163.***.18.29 | Accessed 2018/11/02 10:01(KST)

150 Jungsoo Kim

deserve 5; escape 3; merit 1; need 1; require 1; stand 1; want 18

b. 1780-1850 (total: 7 verb types, 56 instances): bear 8; deserve 4;
fear 1; need 11; prevent 1; require 12; want 19
c. 1850-1920 (total: 9 verb types, 160 instances): bear 10; continue
2; deserve 2; escape 2; need 45; prevent 1; require 19; stand 1;
want 78
d. 1980s-1993 (total: 8 verb types, 355 instances): await 3; bear 28;
escape 2; need 295; require 4; stand 1; suffer 1; want 21

As shown above, only a limited set of the 22 verbs listed in Visser

(1963-1973) were found in the corpus data throughout these periods of time.
One thing we can see here is that the frequency of need concealed passive
construction examples has significantly increased and it is the highest in the
PDE BYU-BNC fiction register. This indicates that the verb need has
gradually become the most representative licensing verb for the concealed
passive construction. Note also that one may assume that bear is another
representative licensing verb for this construction. However, 23 out of 28 bear
concealed passive construction examples found in the BYU-BNC fiction
register involve “thinking about/of” as a fixed expression as in it doesn’t bear
thinking about/of; therefore, it is hard to say that it is another representative
licensing verb. Instead, want should be treated as another representative
licensing verb for this construction given its relative high frequency
throughout these periods of time with its non-fixed use. Notice, however, that
although it had been the most representative licensing verb for this
construction during the late modern English sub-periods, need gained the
status in the PDE period. Moreover, as verbs like need, want, and require
occur in most examples throughout these periods of time, it could be said
that the concealed passive construction has developed in such a way that they
would markedly express the irrealis mood (i.e., deontic modality) (cf. Toyota,
2006: 144-145)
Interestingly, Toyota (2006: 134-135) mentions when some verbs in
Visser (1963-1973) came into existence and ceased to be used in the

경희대학교 | IP: 163.***.18.29 | Accessed 2018/11/02 10:01(KST)

 The “Concealed Passive” Construction Needs Investigating Diachronically 151

concealed passive construction, based on the examples therein. For instance,

Toyota (2006: 134-135) states that verbs such as abide, avoid, continue,
escape, lack, and suffer no longer licensed the concealed passive construction
around 17th-18th century, whereas verbs such as await, miss, prevent, repay,
and stand only began to enter into this construction in the 19th-20th century.
Meanwhile, verbs like bear, deserve, merit, need, require, and want started
to license the construction as early as 1400 and can still appear in PDE.
However, as Toyota (2006: 134-135) classifies the verbs into the three groups
just based upon examples in Visser (1963-1973), the argumentation for the
classification is not convincing enough and indeed there are some corpus
examples that contradict his classification. For instance, one stand example
was found in the CLMET 3.0 1710-1780 sub-period corpus as in (7a), while
one escape example was found in the PDE BYU-BNC fiction register corpus
as in (7b):

(7) a. Sir Charles Wager always said, “that if a sea-fight lasted three
days, he was sure the English suffered the most for the two first,
for no other notion would stand beating for two days together.
(CLMET 3.0, 1744, Walpole)
b. but who then in the nineteenth century shall escape whipping?
(BYU-BNC, 1985, G1a, W-fict-prose)

Another observation with regard to the verb types is that in the corpus,
concealed passive construction examples were not found with many verbs in
Visser’s (1963-1973) list; however, examples were frequently found with such
verbs from an early sub-period corpus, in which they select for an overtly
passive-marked VP. Some examples are presented in (8) and (9):

(8) a. A considerable revenue, therefore, still continues to be spent in

it. (CLMET 3.0, 1766, Smith)
b. What a careless creature I am! — To be sure I deserve to be
punished. (CLMET 3.0, 1740, Richardson)

경희대학교 | IP: 163.***.18.29 | Accessed 2018/11/02 10:01(KST)

152 Jungsoo Kim

(9) a. by good luck, he escaped being perceived; (CLMET 3.0, 1751,

Fielding)
b. Sell your horse, and fear not being laughed at on that account;
(CLMET 3.0 1741, Richardson and Samuel)

In the examples in (8) the verbs in Visser’s (1963-1973) list take a

to-infinitival VP which contains a be + passive VP. Similarly, in the examples
in (9) the verbs in Visser’s (1963-1973) list select for a VP that consists
of a being and a passive VP. Frequent occurrences of such examples and
the lack or sparse occurrences of their concealed passive construction
counterparts point towards two possibilities. A first possibility is that the
concealed passive construction with these verbs had been ousted by the
constructions that observe the syntactic property of the canonical be-passive
construction before the early 18th century or was being gradually replaced
by them during the period of time. These verbs include avoid, continue,
deserve, desire, and escape. The other possibility is that the verbs had not
yet licensed the concealed passive construction by the 18th century or their
use had not been prevalent and common as compared to the constructions
that observe the syntactic property of the canonical be-passive construction;
however, they became more acceptable later and thus they came to be used
more frequently than before. These verbs include need and want.

4.2. Presence of the agent by-phrase

A well-known property that distinguishes among passive-(related)

constructions concerns the presence of the agent by-phrase. Previous
corpus-based studies have shown that the agent by-phrase is realized around
20% in the canonical be-passive construction (Svartvik, 1966; Givón, 1993).
The occurrence rate of the agent by-phrase is even lower in other
passive-related constructions. For example, Hundt (2004) shows that the agent
by-phrase appears only in two instances out of 40 passival construction
examples in ARCHER (A Representative Corpus of Historical English

경희대학교 | IP: 163.***.18.29 | Accessed 2018/11/02 10:01(KST)

 The “Concealed Passive” Construction Needs Investigating Diachronically 153

Registers); thus, its occurrence rate is 5%. In addition, it is known that the
middle construction does not allow for the agent by-phrase at all as in
Bureaucrats bribe easily (*by managers) (data from Keyser & Roeper, 1984;
see also Hundt, 2007).
As for the concealed passive construction, previous studies differ as to
whether the agent by-phrase can be realized in the construction. For instance,
Toyota (2006) claims that the agent by-phrase, in general, cannot be overly
expressed in the concealed passive construction with his own judgment for
the sentence This TV needs fixing by the electrician; on the other hand,
Huddleston & Pullum (2002) argue that the agent by-phrase can optionally
appear in the construction as in The article needs checking (by the editor).
This inconsistency requires corpus-based evidence to verify whether
throughout the periods of time, the agent by-phrase has not been allowed at
all in the construction, it has been optional, or it has undergone some
historical change. Furthermore, corpus-based evidence is required to see if
the pattern behaves more similarly to the canonical be-passive, passival, or
middle construction. Then, consider the following table, which shows the
frequencies of the concealed passive construction examples with agent
by-phrases in the corpus data.

Table 3. Frequencies and percentages of the concealed passive construction examples

with agent by-phrases in the studied corpora
Sub-period # of agent by-phrase Percentage
1710-1780 0 0%
1780-1850 0 0%
1850-1920 0 0%
1980s-1993 1 0.3%
Total 1 0.16%

As can be seen here, only one concealed passive construction example occurs
with an agent by-phrase and it is given in (10):

(10) “Who’d want undressing by a maid,” said Jessica. (BYU-BNC,

경희대학교 | IP: 163.***.18.29 | Accessed 2018/11/02 10:01(KST)

154 Jungsoo Kim

1993, HTS, W-fict-prose)

The result then shows that throughout these periods of time the presence of
the agent by-phrase has not been favored in the concealed passive construction
and that the concealed passive construction patterns more with the passival
(or middle) construction than with the canonical be-passive construction.

4.3. Animacy of the subject

Another distinguishing property among passive-(related) constructions

concerns animacy of the subject. Previous studies have shown that the animate
or human subject is more common in the canonical be-passive construction
than in the passival and middle constructions. For instance, Herold (1986;
cited in Givón, 1993) demonstrates that human subjects are about as likely
to occur in the canonical be-passive construction as are nun-human subject
(54% for human subject vs. 46% for non-human subjects).4 On the other hand,
Hundt (2004) illustrates that only 10 out of 40 passival examples extracted
from the ARCHER contain animate subjects (25%). According to Hundt
(2007), animate subjects occur more rarely in the middle construction. 28 out
of 477 middle construction examples she collected from diverse sources have
animate subjects (5.9%).
Let us now see how frequently animate subjects occur in the concealed
passive construction in the CLMET 3.0 and BYU-BNC fiction register corpus
data. Consider Table 4 and some relevant examples in (11):

Table 4. Frequencies and percentages of the concealed passive construction examples

with animate subjects in the studied corpora
Sub-period # of animate subjects Percentage
1710-1780 12 31.6%
1780-1850 22 39.3%

4
If the distinction is made between the animate and non-animate subjects, the
percentage should be higher than 54% for the animate subjects, of course.

경희대학교 | IP: 163.***.18.29 | Accessed 2018/11/02 10:01(KST)

 The “Concealed Passive” Construction Needs Investigating Diachronically 155

1850-1920 50 31.3%
1980s-1993 138 38.9%
Total 222 36.5%

(11) a. I want swaddling—but there is no time to be lost in exclamations

— (CLMET 3.0, 1767, Sterne)
b. “I require nursing like a child,” he added; (CLMET 3.0, 1813,
Southey)
c. He won’t stand beating. (CLMET 3.0, 1895, Carrol)
d. but who then in the nineteenth century shall escape whipping?
(BYU-BNC, 1985, GIA, W-fict-prose)

The results in Table 4 show that the behavior of the concealed passive
construction in terms of the (dis)-preference for animate subjects has been
in the middle of that of the canonical be-passive construction and that of
the passival construction throughout the periods of time. It is, thus, difficult
to predict to which of the two constructions the concealed passive
construction will behave more similarly in the future.
Nevertheless, one interesting fact about animate subjects in the concealed
passive construction is that the percentage of the want concealed passive
construction examples with animate subjects has increased to a significant
extent in the PDE period, as illustrated in the table below:

Table 5. Frequencies and percentages of the concealed passive construction examples

with want and animate subjects in the studied corpora
# of want + animate
Sub-period # of want examples
subjects
1710-1780 18 5 (27.8%)
1780-1850 19 6 (31.6%)
1850-1920 78 27 (34.6%)
1980s-1993 21 18 (85.7%)
Total 136 56 (41.2%)

Then, compare the results in Table 5 with those in Table 6, which shows

경희대학교 | IP: 163.***.18.29 | Accessed 2018/11/02 10:01(KST)

156 Jungsoo Kim

the frequencies and percentages of the need concealed passive construction

examples with animate subjects:

Table 6. Frequencies and percentages of the concealed passive construction examples

with need and animate subjects in the studied corpora
# of need + animate
Sub-period # of need examples
subjects
1710-1780 1 0 (0.00%)
1780-1850 11 2 (18.2%)
1850-1920 45 9 (20.0%)
1980s-1993 295 116 (39.3%)
Total 352 127 (36.1%)

As discussed earlier, want and need have been the two most representative
licensing verbs for the concealed passive construction since the late modern
English period; however, the former had been most representative throughout
the late modern English sub-periods, whereas the latter became most
representative in the PDE period. As shown in Table 5, the percentage of
the want concealed passive construction examples with animate subjects
significantly increased in the PDE period as compared to the late modern
English sub-periods, although even during the late modern English
sub-periods it had slightly increased. In contrast, as demonstrated in Table
6, the percentage of the need concealed passive construction examples with
animate subjects has gradually increased from the late modern English period
to the PDE period; however, it is still relatively low even in the PDE period.
This seems to account for why in the PDE period need concealed passive
construction examples occur much more frequently than want concealed
passive construction examples. In other words, since in the concealed passive
construction need is relatively neutral in terms of the preference for
animate/inanimate subjects, while want predominantly favors animate subjects
over inanimate subjects, it naturally follows that the former is used more
frequently than the latter.

경희대학교 | IP: 163.***.18.29 | Accessed 2018/11/02 10:01(KST)

 The “Concealed Passive” Construction Needs Investigating Diachronically 157

4.4. Productivity of the –ing VP complement types

A last distinction among passive-(related) constructions has to do with

the range of VP complement types. For instance, it has been shown that the
passival construction is rather limited with respect to the range of its -ing
VP complement types (Hundt, 2004; Visser, 1963-1973). Consider the
following examples:

(12) a. The house is building.

b. A set of new ordnance, consisting of 66 pieces of brass cannon,
are preparing at Woolwich Warren for the new fortification lately
raised at that place (Hundt, 2004: 89)
c. *The car is giving to Henry. (Hundt, 2004: 89)
d. *Henry is giving the car. (under the passive meaning)

Monotransitive verbs like build as in (12a) and ditransitive verbs with an

optional prepositional phrase (PP) like prepare as in (12b) can appear in the
-ing form in the passival construction. However, ditransitive verbs which
obligatorily require a theme argument and a goal argument like give cannot
appear in the -ing form in the passival construction in either the double object
construction or the double complement construction as in (12c) and (12d),
respectively.
Similarly, the range of VP types in the middle construction is restricted,
as exemplified in (13) (Ackema & Schoorlemmer, 1994):

(13) a. This book reads pooly. (Stroik, 1992: 127)

b. ?Such furniture doesn’t send easily to foreign countries. (A &
S, 1994: 80)
*
c. Linguists don’t sell books. (under the passive meaning) (A &
S, 1994, 80)

As in (13a) the middle construction is acceptable with monotransitive verbs

경희대학교 | IP: 163.***.18.29 | Accessed 2018/11/02 10:01(KST)

158 Jungsoo Kim

like read; however, the acceptability degrades significantly with the verbs that
are normally used ditransitively like send and sell as in (13b) and (13c).
Notice that all the verbs above can occur in the canonical be-passive
construction, as shown below:

(14) a. The house was built.

b. A set of new ordnance were prepared at Woolwich Warren for
the new fortification.
c. The car was given to Henry.
d. Henry was given the car.

This shows that the canonical be-passive construction can occur with a much
wider range of VP complement types than the passival and middle
constructions.
Now observe Table 7, which illustrates the frequencies of the -ing VP
complement types of the concealed passive construction licensing verbs.5

Table 7. Frequencies of the -ing VP complement types of the concealed passive

construction licensing verbs in the studied corpora
1710-1780 1780-1850 1850-1920 1980s-1993
Monotransitive 36 49 120 240
Prepositional VP 2 2 7 32
Phrasal VP 0 4 34 63
Complex
1 6 8 22
transitive
Ditransitive 0 0 0 2

5 The total numbers for the sub-periods here do not correspond to the total

numbers of concealed passive construction examples given in (6). This is due to the
fact that in some cases the licensing verb takes more than one -ing phrase as shown
below:

(i) a. After being at the Refuge on Saturday she work early on Sunday morning,
head crowded with things that needed thinking about and sorting out.
(BYU-BNC, 1990, HJH, W-fict-prose)

경희대학교 | IP: 163.***.18.29 | Accessed 2018/11/02 10:01(KST)

 The “Concealed Passive” Construction Needs Investigating Diachronically 159

CP complement 0 0 2 0
Total 39 61 171 359

Some attested examples are presented in (15), which show the -ing VP
complement types in the concealed passive construction.

(15) a. A few of the children were crying They needed loving.

(BYU-BNC, 1992, FSB, W-fict-prose) (Monotransitives)
b. They died of a broken heart. It doesn’t bear thinking about.
(BYU-BNC, 1991, AC7, W-fict-prose) (Prepositional VPs)
c. “the boy is a lazy boy, and wants shaking up, ...” (CLMET 3.0,
1865, Younge) (Phrasal VPs)
d. And she didn’t need reminding of the “good old days”.
(BYU-BNC, 1989, EVG, W-fict-prose) (Complex transitives)
e. The crazy headster needed teaching a lesson. (BYU-BNC, 1989,
EVG, W-fict-prose) (Ditransitives)
f. That the pitch of the voice varies according to the action of the
vocal muscles scarcely needs saying. (CLMET 3.0, 1861,
Spencer) (CP complements)

The results above indicate that the concealed passive construction might begin
to occur with -ing complement VPs headed by monotransitive verbs almost
exclusively but the range of the syntactic types of the -ing complement VPs
has become wider since the middle of the late modern English period. The
data here, therefore, suggest that the concealed passive construction has
become more and more similar to the canonical be-passive construction in
terms of the range of VP complement types that give rise to the passive
meanings.

5. Need/want + Passive VP

Given that need and want have been the two most representative verbs

경희대학교 | IP: 163.***.18.29 | Accessed 2018/11/02 10:01(KST)

160 Jungsoo Kim

that license the concealed passive construction, at this juncture another

interesting construction needs looking at. As discussed earlier, Murray et al.
(1996) and Murray & Simmon (1999) show that in some varieties of English
need and want can select for a passive VP as their complement, and such
combinations invoke passive interpretations accordingly. This observation
suggests that the concealed passive construction could be developed from the
need/want + passive VP construction, which rather shows symmetry between
syntactic form and semantic meaning. In order to investigate this, a corpus
search was conducted in the CLMET 3.0 and another was conducted in the
BYU-BNC fiction register. For the former, all the need and want examples
were searched for and they were carefully looked at to see whether they were
instances of this construction; however, no instance of this construction was
found in the corpus. For the latter, all the examples that consist of the lemmas
of need and want and an -en/-ed verb form were searched for and irrelevant
examples like Consequently, her needs had intensified/The hairs on her arms
stood on end as that electrifying pulse of need sparked through her were
filtered out.6 This corpus search yielded 6 examples of this construction and
they are given below:

(16) a. He must need fed. (BYU-BNC, 1991, BNC, W-fict-prose)

b. Oh, yes. Baking, cooking, rocking the babies... whatever needs
done. (BYU-BNC, 1993, HGN, W-fict-prose)
c. It stood there, shaded from the sun, paintwork badly needing
done, ... (BYU-BNC, 1987, CAV, W-fict-poetry)
d. The place is a mess, and the budgie needs fed. (BYU-BNC, 1987,
CAV, W-fict-poetry)
e. Some girl Froebe wants interrogated after lunch. (BYU-BNC,
1993, FSR, W-fict-prose)
f. He’s gone off after your dad before, times out of mind — but

6The reason why -ed verb forms in addition to -en verb forms were searched
for is that some words in the BYU-BNC were mistakenly tagged so that some -ed
verb forms in the corpus are actually in the passive verb forms.

경희대학교 | IP: 163.***.18.29 | Accessed 2018/11/02 10:01(KST)

 The “Concealed Passive” Construction Needs Investigating Diachronically 161

two-three days and he’s allus home again, wanting fed.

(BYU-BNC, 1989, F99, W-fict-prose)

The low frequency of this construction and its occurrences only in the PDE
corpus indicate that this construction emerged later than the concealed passive
construction in British English and it has not been commonly used as
compared to the concealed passive construction. Its rather limited use is
further supported by the fact that in five examples out of six above, need
or want takes a passive VP headed by fed or done.
An additional observation is that the need/want + object NP + passive
VP construction came to existence earlier than the need/want + passive VP
construction. Although no need/want + passive VP construction examples
were found in the CLMET 3.0 and a very few in the BYU-BNC fiction
register, some need/want + object NP + passive VP construction examples
were found in the former and quite a lot in the latter. See Table 8 and the
examples presented in (17).

Table 8. Frequencies of the need/want + object NP + passive VP construction

examples in the studied corpora
Sub-period # of need/want + object NP + passive VP
1710-1780 1
1780-1850 5
1850-1920 38
1980s-1993 372
Total 416

(17) a. I send four pairs of silk stockings, but I do not want them washed
at present. (CLMET 3.0, 1811, Austen)
b. I need it done quickly. (BYU-BNC, 1993, GUU, W-fict-prose)

In order to collect examples of the need/want + object NP + passive VP

construction examples from the CLMET 3.0 corpus, again all the need/want
examples were exhaustively searched for and then only relevant examples

경희대학교 | IP: 163.***.18.29 | Accessed 2018/11/02 10:01(KST)

162 Jungsoo Kim

were extracted. To collect examples of the construction from the BYU-BNC

fiction register corpus, all the examples of the lemmas of need and want and
an -ed/-en verb within the next seven words were exhaustively searched for
with the use of the wildcard *, which corresponds to one slot for a non-spaced
word or punctuation symbol.7 Therefore, no instances of the need/want +
passive VP construction in the CLMET 3.0 and a very few instances in the
BYU-BNC fiction register and the results in Table 8 suggest 1) that the
need/want + passive construction VP construction might have
emerged/developed from the need/want + object NP + passive VP
construction despite the structural complexity of the latter compared to the
former; 2) the development of the concealed passive construction since the
late modern English period might have contributed to the
emergence/development of the need/want + passive VP construction in spite
of its asymmetry of form and meaning.

6. Conclusion

We have thus far seen how the concealed passive construction has
developed since the late modern English period. In particular, its development
was examined on the basis of authentic historical corpus data from the
CLMET 3.0 and BYU-BNC fiction register and the properties of the
concealed passive construction were compared to those of other
passive-(related) constructions such as the canonical be-passive, passival,
middle, and need/want + passive VP constructions. The current study showed
the following developmental properties of the concealed passive construction.
First of all, only a limited set of the 22 verbs in Visser’s (1963-1973)

7 The maximum number of strings of words and punctuations is nine. Therefore,

in the corpus search I put zero to seven wildcard symbols between the verb need/want
and the -en/-ed verb form. In theory, there can be more instances of the need/want
+ object NP + passive VP construction in the BYU-BNC fiction register. However,
such cases should be infrequent and the cases where the object NP is long (the object
NP consisting of more than four words) are also rare in fact.

경희대학교 | IP: 163.***.18.29 | Accessed 2018/11/02 10:01(KST)

 The “Concealed Passive” Construction Needs Investigating Diachronically 163

list have involved in licensing the concealed passive construction during the
late modern English period and PDE period. The two most representative
verbs have been need and want throughout the periods of time, although the
most representative one changed in PDE.
Next, very rare occurrences of the concealed passive construction with
by-agent phrases throughout the late modern English period and PDE period
reveal that this construction has behaved more similarly to the passival (or
middle) construction than the canonical be-passive construction.
By contrast, the behavior of the concealed passive construction has been
somewhere in the middle of that of the canonical be-passive construction and
that of the passival construction in terms of the (dis)-preference for animate
subjects throughout the late modern English period and PDE period,
disregarding the behavior of the middle construction due to its very strong
dispreference for animate subjects. This actually makes it hard to make a
prediction about in which way it will behave in the future. Nonetheless, want
concealed passive construction examples started to dominantly favor animate
subjects in the PDE period, while need ones did not. Given that need became
the most representative verb licensing the concealed passive construction in
the PDE period, it follows that the percentage of the concealed passive
construction examples with animate subjects is not high. If we think about
it the other way around, however, it also makes sense that need became the
most representative verb licensing the concealed passive construction in the
PDE period, since it is rather neutral with respect to the preference for
animate/inanimate subjects.
Furthermore, the development of the range of -ing VP complement types
in the concealed passive construction during the late modern English period
and PDE period also suggests that the construction has become more similar
to the canonical be-passive construction than the passival and middle
constructions.
Finally, a very low frequency of the need/want + passive VP construction,
its very recent emergence, and its limited use as compared to both the
need/want concealed passive construction and the need/want + object NP +

경희대학교 | IP: 163.***.18.29 | Accessed 2018/11/02 10:01(KST)

164 Jungsoo Kim

passive VP construction indicate that those two constructions could be

contributed to the emergence and development of the need/want + passive
VP construction, but not vice versa.
In summary, this corpus-based study of the diachronic development of
the grammatical properties of the concealed passive construction since the late
modern English period shows that it is not only peculiar in terms of the VP
form that triggers the passive interpretation but it has also undergone different
historical change from other passive-(related) constructions. The construction,
therefore, contributes to the further addition to the active/passive voice
continuum in English.

❙References ❙

Ackema, P. and M. Schoorlemmer. 1994. The Middle Construction and the

Syntax-semantics Interface. Lingua 93, 59-90. doi: 10.1016/0024-3841(94)
90353-0
Buyssens, E. 1979. The Active Voice with Passive Meaning in Modern English.
English Studies 60, 745-761. doi: 10.1080/00138387908598014
Givón, T. 1993. English Grammar: A Functional-Based Introduction. Vol.2.
Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins.
Herold, R. 1986. A Quantitative Study of the Alternation between the Be- and the
Get-Passives. Paper presented at the 15th NWAV Conference.
Huddleston, R. and G. K. Pullum. 2002. The Cambridge Grammar of the English
Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hundt, M. 2004. The Passival and the Progressive Passive: A Case Study of Layering
in the English Aspect and Voice Systems. In Lindquist, H. and C. Mair (eds.),
Corpus Approaches to Grammaticalization in English. Amsterdam/
Philadelphia: Benjamins, 79-120.
Hundt, M. 2007. English Mediopassive Constructions: A Cognitive, Corpus-based
Study of Their Origin, Spread and Current Status. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Keyser, S. J. and T. Roeper. 1984. On the Middle and Ergative Construction in
English. Linguistic Inquiry 15, 381-416.
Murray, T. E. and T. C. Frazer and B. L. Simon. 1996. Need + Past Participle in

경희대학교 | IP: 163.***.18.29 | Accessed 2018/11/02 10:01(KST)

 The “Concealed Passive” Construction Needs Investigating Diachronically 165

American English. American Speech 71(3), 255-271.

Murray, T. E. and B. L. Simon. 1999. Want + Past Participle in American English.
American Speech 74(2), 140-164.
Quirk, R., S. Greenbaum, G. Leech and J. Svartvik. 1985. A Comprehensive Grammar
of the English Language. London: Longman.
Smitterberg, E. 2005. The Progressive in 19th-century English: A Process of
Integration. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi.
Stroik, T. 1992. Middles and Movement. Linguistic Inquiry 23, 127-137.
Svartvik, J. 1966. On Voice in the English Verb. The Hague and Paris: Mouton.
Toyota, J. 2006. Necessitative Passive This TV needs fixing. Lund Working Papers
in Linguistics 6, 133-151.
Visser, F. T. 1963-1973. An Historical Syntax of the English Language. Leiden: E.
J. Brill.
Warner, A. 1995. Predicting the Progressive Passive: Parameter Change within a
Lexicalist Framework. Language 71(3), 533-557. doi: 10.2307/416219

Jungsoo Kim
School of English
Kyung Hee University
26 Kyungheedae-ro, Hoegi-dong, Dongdaemun-gu, Seoul, 02447, Korea
02-961-0211
jungsookim@khu.ac.kr

Received: January 31, 2018

Revised: April 7, 2018
Accepted: April 15, 2018

경희대학교 | IP: 163.***.18.29 | Accessed 2018/11/02 10:01(KST)

View publication stats