Globe-trotting
The recent break in posting will, I’m afraid, likely continue for about a week, as I gear up for a couple of presentations at the ICCG. In the meantime, the assignment is to think about the word say. Outside of quotative inversion, I can think of at least two constructions where say acts exceptionally: one imparts say with an otherwise-unseen valency, and in the other, say imparts upon the construction an external distribution that is otherwise illicit.
Comments(5)
Is the first construction the “complex passive,” as in “He is said to be affiliated with the Mob,” even though *”They said him to be affiliated with the Mob” is ungrammatical?
Ah, I actually hadn’t considered this use. It’s true that this is a valency that is present in the passive but not in the active. However, I think this pattern can be seen in other verbs, though admittedly not with the same acceptability. For instance, “be contended to be” and “be assumed to be” seem to be pretty good, though the active versions are pretty not-so-good. And of course a verb like “rumor” is defective, in that it only exists in this sort of passive construction (that’s the syntactician’s “only,” not the variationist’s “only”).
As far as I know, “say” is the only word that gets a special valency alternation in the particular construction that I’m thinking of (and I’ll post it soon).
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