PASSIVES AND TOPICALIZATION

Recent studies, suggesting that passives emphasize the importance of their logical object over their logical subject, have employed full passives with both nominals similarly determined (e.g. the Noun + Verb + the Noun). When subjects are asked to indicate the important entity of full passives where the definiteness of nominals is varied, they select the definitely marked nominal in sentences like the N + V + a N, a N + V + the N, and the event in sentences like a N + V + a N. Since these results apply both to short passives and to active sentences, it would seem that the important entity of an utterance is not solely indicated by voice and word-order, but is more closely concerned with definiteness. This is apparently related to a feature of discourse which may be termed topicalization.