Passive constructions and asymmetries between languages

Researchers often make participants jump through hoops. Because of our own 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, be-based passives such as La guerra fue empezada por … ‘The war was started by …’ are much less frequent in Spanish than in English. Spanish reserves them mostly for formal written discourse. Outside that register, the left-dislocation of the patient is more commonly achieved through two other constructions. One hinges on the reflexive pronoun se, as in El apartamento se vendió ‘The apartment was sold’ (Takagaki, 2005). The other uses a pronominal object clitic, usually in preverbal position, as illustrated below.¹ The latter construction, though not strictly passive, is thematically equivalent to many passives in English (Hidalgo Downing & Downing, 2012).

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

The ratio of 8 to 5,300 results, from exact-phrase Google searches in September 2024, suggests that be-passives are much less common than the construction with 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 passives. For instance, in a study on crosslinguistic syntactic priming in bilingual children, Vasilyeva et al. (2010) used Spanish primes such as La ventana fue rota por la pelota ‘The window was broken by the ball’. As an example of a passive that the children might produce in Spanish, they gave El perro fue lavado por el gato ‘The dog was washed by the cat’. Further searches from the same month allow a quick-and-dirty corpus analysis of this construction. 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 increase the children’s use of the English-like passive in Spanish. The authors described this pattern as an asymmetry, a label widely echoed in the subsequent literature on crosslinguistic syntactic priming (e.g., Serratrice, 2022). The caveat is that the stimuli themselves contained an asymmetry. The be-passive is infelicitous in Spanish, certainly in comparison with be-passives in English (Hartsuiker & Bernolet, 2017; Vasilyeva et al., 2010), and especially among children, who use passives even less frequently.

Syntactic isomorphism, the one-to-one mapping of syntactic structures across languages, is less common than it may seem. Even when the same structures exist in two languages, their frequencies may be fundamentally different, as in the case of be-based passives in English and Spanish. Where possible, therefore, stimuli should use the functionally equivalent construction in each language, even when the surface structures differ, to avoid skewed results. This would also make the results of crosslinguistic priming studies easier to interpret. At the same time, seeking crosslinguistic overlaps may be like looking for a needle in a haystack.