Chopping the fuzzy logic of the active ↔ passive opposition in English verbs

With a plethora of factors at work blurring the notoriously tenuous distinction between active and passive interpretations of verb constructions, one might with good reason express doubt as to whether establishing hard and fast principles for differentiating them is at all a sensible task. After a brief survey of passivum tantum- and basically passive verbs, as well as of chameleon-like, statal and dynamic passives, the author of the present contribution takes it upon herself to closer investigate the verbal or adjectival status exhibited by a series of -ed forms – as cited by various linguists (Stein, Quirk et al, Downing & Locke, Dixon) – with a view to advancing a more rigorous classification of -ed forms based on the syntactico-semantic description of their individual behaviour in the various combinations analysed. The table submitted shows -ed forms located on an imaginary scale spanning passivehood from bona fide dynamic passives to copular complementation, with four further partitions in between. In the concluding section the author further glosses the subcategorization proposed, in that she provides the semantico-pragmatic motivation underlying the rather difficult choices made in the process.