Syntax I

There’s an inconsistency between what I’ve said in class (and on handouts) about where the by-phrase attaches in a passive, and where your comments on your returned homeworks might say to put it. This is not really the grader’s fault—there was an error on the key I gave him.

But, for the record: The by-phrase does seem to adjoin to the PassP, rather than to the vP. If there is a comment on your homework about this, the comment probably has it backwards. And, I guess, if there’s no comment on your homework about this, there probably should have been one.

One might ask how the Agent θ-role can be assigned to the by-phrase if it is so far away from v, and the answer has to be that v is not in fact assigning the Agent θ-role to the by-phrase. The relationship between the event and the Agent role introduced by by can be assumed to be about the same as the relationship between the event and the Instrument role introduced by with (e.g., with a hammer). There are still open questions here, but we basically want to think of the agentive by-phrases as different from the Agent that appears in SpecvP in active (that is, non-passive) sentences.