Real-life pseudo-passives: The usage and discourse functions of adjunct-based passive constructions

Abstract The aim of this study is to examine the usage of adjunct-based prepositional passives of intransitive verbs. The occurrence of this highly atypical construction, referred to as the pseudo-passive, is motivated by a variety of factors related to its individual components as well as the discourse context. The pseudo-passive is first characterized in terms of its most characteristic verbs and prepositions. Then three main types of the construction are distinguished on the basis of their subject semantics and discourse function, which correlate with specific syntactic and semantic features observed in the data. The study relies on statistical tools for the analysis of the corpus data: collostructional analysis, multiple correspondence analysis and logistic regression.