Passive constructions and asymmetries between languages

Researchers often make participants jump through hoops. Due to our personal blind spots, it seems easier to realise the full extent of these acrobatics when we consider the work of other researchers. In linguistic research, the acrobatics are often spurred by unnatural grammatical constructions. For instance, in Spanish, be-based passive constructions—such as La guerra fue empezada por … ‘The war was started by …’—are much less frequent than in English. In Spanish, be-passives are mostly reserved for the formal, written discourse. Outside of that register, two other constructions are more commonly used to front the patient in a sentence. One construction hinges on the reflexive pronoun se—e.g., El apartamento se vendió ‘The apartment was sold’ (Takagaki, 2005). Another construction implements a pronominal object clitic in preverbal position, as illustrated below.¹ The latter construction, though not strictly passive, is thematically equivalent to many passives in English.

Comparing the frequency of the English-like, be-based passive to the construction that implements a pronominal object clitic in preverbal position.

The ratio of 8 to 5,300 results suggests that be-passives are much less common than the construction implementing a preverbal clitic. In the light of this ratio, it is surprising to find linguistic research that seems to overlook the asymmetry between English and Spanish regarding passives. For instance, in a study on crosslinguistic syntactic priming in bilingual children, Vasilyeva et al. (2010) used stimuli such as El gato fue lavado por el perro ‘The cat was washed by the dog’. Through a quick-and-dirty corpus analysis using a search engine, we can examine the limitations of these stimuli. Whereas the English form ‘The cat was washed’ is common enough, the literal translations El gato fue lavado and La gata fue lavada are essentially negligible.

Comparing the frequency of passive constructions in English and in Spanish.

Vasilyeva et al. (2010) observed that, when primed with English-like, be-based passives in Spanish, the children increased their use of passive constructions in English. In contrast, exposure to English passives in the prime sentences did not lead to a greater use of the English-like passives in Spanish. The authors described this contrast as an asymmetry, which has been profusely echoed in the subsequent literature on crosslinguistic syntactic priming (Serratrice, 2022). The caveat about this finding is that the stimuli themselves contained an asymmetry, as the be-passive is infelicitous in Spanish, certainly when compared to be-passives in English (Hartsuiker & Bernolet, 2017; Vasilyeva et al., 2010), and especially among children, who use passives even less frequently.

Syntactic structures do not translate seamlessly across languages, especially when one structure (such as the English passive) is far less frequent in the other language (Spanish). Thus, where possible, stimuli should capture the functional equivalents between languages, not just the surface-level structural forms, to avoid skewed results. By this means, it will become easier to interpret the results of crosslinguistic priming. At the same time, once you begin to compare between languages in depth, chasing crosslinguistic overlaps feels like looking for a needle in a haystack.