Thursday 13 December 2018

Receptive Voice: Complements To Prepositions As Subject

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 350-1):
… then there are the ‘indirect participants’ functioning as Complements to prepositions, some of which … are potential Subjects; these give various other kinds of receptive such as ‘Location–receptive’, for example the bed hadn’t been slept in, ‘Manner–receptive’, for example this pen’s never been written with, and so on.  Normally these are also medio–receptives, that is, they are middle not effective clauses.  But receptives with idiomatic phrasal verbs, such as it’s been done away with, she’s very much looked up to, that prize has never been put in for, are often ‘true’ receptives in the sense that the prepositional phrase really represents a participant