Author Topic: Passive Questions  (Read 6265 times)

Offline Moonie

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Passive Questions
« on: February 10, 2016, 09:12:49 PM »
Hello!
I'm new here and syntax is pretty new to me. I was wondering how to draw the Deep Structure of a passive question such as "Might the politician have been booed by the crowd?".
My guess for the answer right now would be "Might have been booed the politician by the crowd.", but I'm not very confident with it.

Any help would be much appreciated!

Cheers ;D

Offline panini

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Re: Passive Questions
« Reply #1 on: February 17, 2016, 12:45:20 PM »
You would start by figuring what the passive transformation does, thus what sentence your sentence "starts from" (doesn't undergo passive). You would also want to likewise undo the question transformation. Then it is a simple matter of figuring out what the deep structure of the sentence without either the passive or question transformations having applied, and then deal with the "other stuff" like affix-hopping. If you have no idea what affix hopping is, then you would have to know what theory of syntax your instructor is using. I'm betting that it doesn't actually involve affix hopping.