This construction needs understood: An experimental study of the Alternative Embedded Passive (AEP)

Abstract

The Alternative Embedded Passive (AEP) occurs in the Midland region in variation with the infinitival passive. AEPs may occur with the verbs need, want, and like: The baby needs/wants/likes fed. Murray & Simon (2002) observe a hierarchy of acceptability and usage across the three AEP verbs, with need as the most acceptable and like as the least. Building on an idea in Edelstein (2014), this paper presents evidence that the hierarchy results from lexical semantic properties of need, want, and like. Experiment results reveal that the hierarchy is alive in the judgments of young Pennsylvania speakers, and also emerges partially in the judgments of speakers from New England unfamiliar with the construction. The hierarchy only fully emerges with Pennsylvania speakers when the subject of the sentence is sentient (e.g., the baby). With non-sentient subjects (e.g., the computer), want and like are similar and less acceptable than need. We attribute this to a property of the verb need, which can be either a deontic modal (which does not take a thematic subject) or a thematic subject-taking verb. We discuss how our results support the hypothesis that speakers adapt to novel dialectal constructions by forming analogies to constructions already in their grammars.