By-fráze v českém participiálním pasivu (cesta k analýze pasiva)

This study discusses the three probably most influential theories of the passive in generative grammar: Chomsky (1957), Jaeggli (1986) and Collins (2005), aiming to evaluate their proposed analyses of the passive structure in terms of their adequacy with regard to the syntactic and semantic properties of the by-phrase in the Czech long passive, i.e. the structure “be – passive participle – DP with instrumental case (= by-phrase)”. It is shown that from this perspective, the most adequate theory of the verbal passive is the one by Collins (2005; 2018b), called “smuggling analysis”. This is because it naturally explains the thematic interpretation of the by-phrase and determines its distribution in the passive structure. The smuggling analysis predicts that the Czech by-phrase (= DP with instrumental case) is the external argument and has the same semantic/thematic interpretation as the [Spec, vP]-argument of the active clause. This theory is entirely consistent with other principles of generative grammar, especially with the UTAH hypothesis (Baker, 1988).