ON THE SO-CALLED UNBOUNDED PASSIVES

Huang, Li & Li (2009) claim that (i) there exists in Chinese a type of bei constructions, the so-called unbounded or long-distance passives, in which the pre-bei patient can be indefinitely long from the site from which it is interpreted; (ii) the unbounded or long-distance dependency relation in the bei construction is somewhat likely to exist in the ba construction. By revisiting the structural and semantic properties of the bei construction, I show that Huang, Li & Li's examples are not really attested. I argue that there are two problems with Huang, Li & Li's claim about unbounded passives: (i) it ignores the fundamental function of passivization; (ii) it mistakenly equates passivization with topicalization. I also point out that Huang, Li & Li's invention of the ill-formed unbounded passives reveals that interpretive factors may sometimes play a crucial role in the linguistic judgments involving the Chinese language.