Gerund Passives

It was mentioned above that the NP gerunds display certain clausal properties. It is therefore not surprising that they too have their own set of transformationally related structures. For example, NP gerunds allow passivization just like their sentential counterparts (cf. examples ((268)) and ((269))).

(267)0(267

(268)

The lawyers objected to the slanderous book being written by John.  (268)0(268

(269)

Susan could not forget having been embarrassed by the vicar. 

In the English XTAG grammar, gerund passives are treated in an almost exactly similar fashion to sentential passives, and are assigned separate trees within the appropriate tree families. The passives occur in pairs, one with the by phrase, and another without it. There are two feature restrictions imposed on the passive trees: (a) only verbs with <mode> = ppart (i.e., verbs with passive morphology) can be the anchors, and (b) the highest verb in the verb sequence is required to be <mode> = ger. The two restrictions, together, ensure the selection of only those sequences of auxiliary verb(s) that select <mode> = ppart and <passive> = + (such as being or having been but NOT having). The passive trees are assumed to be related to only the NP gerund trees (and not the determiner gerund trees), since passive structures involve movement of some object to the subject position (in a movement analysis). Also, like the sentential passives, gerund passives are found in most tree families that have a direct object in the declarative tree. Figure 17.3 shows the gerund passive trees for the transitive tree family.

  

Figure: Passive Gerund trees from the transitive tree family: $\alpha$Gnx1Vbynx0 (a) and $\alpha$Gnx1V (b)

(a) $\alpha$Gnx1Vbynx0	(b) $\alpha$Gnx1V