Voice, manners, and results in adjectival passives

The chapter argues that there are two functional heads in the VP domain: a little v head introducing an event and Voice introducing the external argument. Evidence is drawn from adjectival passives, which split into several types that can be described in terms of this architecture. The chapter explores the interaction between Voice, v, and manner vs. result interpretations of verbal meaning in resultant state vs. target state adjectival passives. First, a summary is given of the main arguments for postulating a v head and a Voice head in adjectival passives. The chapter then focuses on the absence of Voice in target state adjectival passives. New evidence for the absence of Voice comes from two empirical domains: constraints on verb classes that are allowed and disallowed to form target state adjectival passives and a phenomenon of coercion of manner, instrument-based denominal verbs into result verbs in target state adjectival passives.