Arguments for a passive transformation
Aside from the passive auxiliary argument, there are two other standard arguments for PASSIVE—one concerning its cyclic interaction with a rule of Raising, the other concerning PASSIVE and idiom chunks. The former involves sentences like.
(1)
The bagel was believed by Oscar to have been eaten by Max.
It is argued that, with respect to the derivation of 1, if Raising is a rule, then PASSIVE must be too. The motivation for Raising is based on the assumption that the operation of PASSIVE is subject to a clause-mate condition. This assumption is unnecessary, given Chomsky’s tensed-S condition (1973). Alternatively, the underlying structure of 1 could be Figure 1—in which case the derivation would not require the cyclic interaction of PASSIVE and Raising (cf. Kimball 1972).
Figure 1
Instead, Figure 1 yields 1 from the application of Subject Raising and VP-Extraposition—i.e., the same operations that apply to infinitival subject complements of seem.
The idiom-chunk argument is based on the claim that idiom chunks like close tabs and headway do not occur freely as NP’s, but nonetheless show up as surface subjects in passives. A rule PASSIVE would account for such restrictions on occurrence. However, it is not clear that restrictions on the occurrence of idiom chunks in NP’s is so severely restricted. Consider the following:
(2)
