Passive prototypes, topicality and conceptual space

Passive constructions are perhaps the most widely studied grammatical phenomena within generative grammar. Typological studies describe the wide variety of features of passive constructions cross-linguistically, and both typological and acquisition studies offer insight into the relative markedness of these constructions. This dissertation has the goal of investigating the nature of membership within the category "passive" and cross-linguistic comparison of constructions, "passive" and otherwise.; A model of universal passive types within the framework of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) is presented. This is accomplished by proposing a set of type definitions, characterizing both the relatively unmarked and relatively marked features of passive constructions. This provides some granularity in the passive's characterization, but does not model the markedness of these features with respect to each other. To that end, preference principles in the construction of passive type matrices in HPSG are introduced: a metagrammar provided by Universal Grammar describing the markedness of each type with respect to its supertype. The resulting system models a passive prototype within HPSG.; Topicality measures were collected from the Uppsala Corpus of Russian for passive and active uses of the Russian verbs pisat'/ napisat' 'to write,' davat'/ dat' 'to give,' and zabyvat'/ zabyt' 'to forget.' Croft's (2001) notion of plotting constructions in "conceptual space" is exploited as a means of cross-linguistic comparison using these topicality measures. Examining the conceptual space of various voice constructions with these Russian verbs, Croft's generalizations are upheld, their position being consistent whether Referential Distance or Topic Persistence is used as a measure. Finally, data from other typological discourse studies is plotted, noting where various voice constructions pattern, and how this data fits into Croft's model.