Passive

THE ACQUISITION OF PASSIVES IN EUROPEAN PORTUGUESE

ANTÓNIA PIMENTEL ESTRELA

ABSTRACT
The aim of this study is to describe the acquisition of passives in European Portuguese, specifically regarding its comprehension. Many studies reveal that this construction is acquired late in different languages, both when production and comprehension are considered.
The apparent cross linguistic delay suggests children’s knowledge is somehow restricted, leading some authors to claim that the difficulties are due to syntactic maturation (Borer & Wexler 1987; Hirsch & Wexler 2007) or to the development of thematic role assignment (Fox & Grodzinsky 1998). Other studies value the importance of the input (Gordon & Chafetz 1990; Demuth et al. 2010), while others emphasize the pragmatic and discursive features assigned to the passive (Tomasello 2000; Marchman et al. 1991). Recently, some important studies point out that the acquisition of the passive construction is not delayed, arguing that if the felicity conditions are met, children will not have problems interpreting this structure, although other factors may be involved (O’Brien et al. 2006; Thatcher et al. 2008).
This study aims at addressing the lack of systematic data on the acquisition of passives in European Portuguese. In order to accomplish that, it presents the results of four pilot studies on the comprehension of the structure under analysis. The first study is designed to test comprehension of long and short passive with actional verbs; the second and third analyze the comprehension of passives with actional and non-actional verbs; and the fourth assesses whether children distinguish three types of passive and their different properties (eventive, resultative and stative passives).
First, the results show that four-year- old children can understand passives with actional verbs, revealing no difference between short and long passives. Secondly, passives with non-actional verbs are problematic for children of different age groups and even active sentences with non-actional verbs are difficult. Thirdly, the analysis of the results of the fourth experimental study reveals that, at five, children do not show significant differences in the judgments of grammaticality assigned to various types of passive, with a performance at the chance level, contrarily to the performance of six-year-old children. Grammaticality contrasts are not completely understood by children, but we can already notice a statistically significant development in the recognition of the contrast between eventive and stative passives; and resultative and stative passives.
The analysis of an acquisition corpus complete these results, showing that even before the age of two children produce stative passives, and before they are three years old they produce eventive and resultative passives.
The study conducted allows us to evaluate the different proposals in the literature, covering various aspects relevant to the acquisition of passive structure, a structure in which different factors are involved, justifying that the processing of various types of the passive construction occurs gradually.

KEYWORDS: Language acquisition, passive structure,  eventive, resultative and stative passives

The changing relationship between football clubs and supporters has been the subject of recent debate but has received relatively limited empirical analysis based on case study research. This article draws on interviews and a questionnaire fan survey to assess the extent to which four football clubs had developed
mechanisms to include ‘active’ supporters in club-related decisions. The article then examines the strategies put in place by each club to encourage supporter involvement and whether they have been successful in their actions. The results
indicated that supporters of clubs which encouraged an inclusive relationship through the opportunity of two-way dialogue expressed greater satisfaction than supporters of clubs which maintained one-way dialogue. The article concludes by
suggesting that those clubs which are seen to exclude ‘active’ supporters could face long-term financial consequences if they continue to operate in this way.
I

The main scope of the research is to show how architecure: the making of metaphors is valid with  inteactive (kinetic and responsive) architecture. By its very definition interactive architecture is a metaphor conditioning “architecture” with “interactive”, and vice versa.; when something interacts it transfers; and, “transfer” is another word for metaphor; and,  as all metaphors “interactive architecture” makes the strange familiar and expresses one thing in terms of another: that is its two referents, “interactive” and “architecture”. This research will show that architecture makes metaphors with all sorts of technological and conceptual variations whether  static,responsive, interactive or kinetic. Each period in architectural history technology was the landmark of its period; perhaps ours will be marked by our moving parts.

The present study has the objective of researching how consumers in this segment react when
dissatisfied. For this, the projective technique of thematic stories was used to collect the data.
Two perspectives on how these consumers react when dissatisfied where perceived. The first,
illustrates a passive behavior of how to resolve consumption problems, which, in general, means
not complaining and conforming to the loss. The second, differently, illustrates a reaction
against the dissatisfaction, expressed by complaining or, even, adopting legal action. Differently
from what the literature points to, the present study shows that low income consumers do
complain when dissatisfied, since they know, at least in discourse, their consumer rights.
Companies should recognize the distinct reactions of low income consumers when dissatisfied.
The rationality that these consumers prefer lower prices instead of better services seems to not
be a reality.

The five Tacanan languages (Amazonian Bolivia and Peru), Araona, Cavineña, Ese Ejja, Reyesano and Tacana, have a conspicuously similar verbal suffix  -ta (or  -ka in one dialect of Ese Ejja). Depending on the language and the transitivity of the verb stem it attaches to, this suffix is alternatively used to refer to a third person plural S argument or a third person singular or plural A argument, or to mark a passive derivation. In this paper, I argue that the suffixes are all historically related, and that they all come from a single source, a third person plural suffix * -ta. I also suggest that this marker could have originated in a third person plural independent pronoun that I reconstruct as **tuna.

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for by diachronic models in which the notions of prototype and prototype effects play a role. The historical data discussed in the article reflect a process of polarization consisting in the functionalization of an (embryonic) formal and semantic contrast between the si-construction and another passive construction,
the so-called periphrastic passive (formed with essere, ‘be’ + past participle). These two constructions are preferentially associated with two distinct constellations of semantic traits in present-day Italian, but not (or at least not so sharply) in Old Italian.

Alveoli are part of the inner lining of the lungs, involved in gas exchange; fermentation is a metabolic process of conversion. In this presentation, these bodily processes are used as metaphors for thinking and making, forming the basis of discussion on how passivity can be transformative. The notion of doing " nearly-nothing, " distinct from doing wholly nothing, is examined here as a state in which transformation occurs below the threshold of conscious thought and beyond the purview of productivity. The unconscious and autonomic are foregrounded, suggesting the body as a site of thought. Habit will be analysed as a passive process that is unstructured and unreflective, yet opens one to the world and signals the importance of being imprinted upon. " Becoming " as a way of framing art-making will be investigated through the concept of imago and the aesthetic of the interesting, acknowledging the durational and indeterminate within passive transformative processes. In examining habit and becoming, the idea of doing nearly-nothing as expounded through metaphors of breathing and metabolising here acknowledges the significance of passive processes in fuelling thought and art-making.

In present work a development of the passive approach is made to design of human oriented robots. Model of robots with controllable compliance modules on the base and cable transmissions is developed that creates a natural security in the interaction with human. In the paper computer model of 4R robot is developed and simulated using Solid Dynamics 2004+ program software. Computer simulations of the robot compliance behavior are carried out. Influence of the compliance on the position control and on the motor torques is been evaluated when changing based mechanical characteristics. The results obtained from calculation of the mechanical parameters are also illustrated graphically. A model with animation of motion is obtained.

Historical architecture, in Mediterranean basin, assumes a type-morphological structure in coherence to microclimatic characters of site, defining the optimization of energetic relationships with surrounding natural environment. The building - as fluid, adapted, sensitive interface, superficial border line that is able to define the relationships with environment and to model itself on environmental factors – finds in technological environmental design tools and criteria to make a dialog with climate and natural elements: sun, wind, light, water, vegetation are materials and sources of energy that the project makes to selectively interact with the context, in a continuous exchange of material and energy, determining an equilibrium of transformations

The paper presents evidence concerning early acquisition of passive morphology in Inuktitut, the language of the Inuit in northern Canada. Data from three Inuit children learning Inuktitut as their first language show that the passive is used in both basic and complex patterns as early as 2 years of age. Possible reasons for this seeming precociousness include polysynthetic language structure and frequency of passives in adult input.

Acquiring temperature measurements using conventional methods can be costly and technically challenging. These active temperature sensors limit the environmental conditions in which they can be deployed. Most of them cannot tolerate wide temperature ranges and they are susceptible to failure in high radiation environments. This paper presents an energy autonomous wireless temperature sensing system without requiring physical contact or active elements. The environmental friendly device is made up of a planar capacitor integrated into passive filter. As the temperature changes, the capacitance is modified and consequently alters the resonant frequency of the circuit. The sensor can be integrated with an antenna and interrogated at distance by a reader. To prove this concept, a wireless sensing system is designed and simulated using a variable capacitor. Simulations were performed in order to optimize the device design and to verify the frequency shift with sensitivity of 2.85 MHz/°C....

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This paper explores the syntax of the two types of anticausatives (marked vs. unmarked ones) in Acehnese to support the proposed division of agentivity and causation into two distinct functional projections, namely VoiceP and vP (Alexiadou et al. 2006 among others), analyzing the anticausative marker teu- in marked anticausatives as an overt realization of Voice head with [-agent, -D] features. The evidence is two-fold: (i) the three-way contrast between the two types of anticausatives and passives revealed by several syntactic tests and (ii) the distribution of the anticausative marker with respect to other functional heads.