The Addressee As A Semantic Actant Of The Passive Diatheses

Abstract

The theoretical basis of the study is the theory of diatheses which is founded on the so – called conceptual – situational scheme and is considered as a semantic or a deep syntactic level. In the present article the passive diatheses in which the subject of the sentence is in correlation with the semantic actant – the addressee is analysed. The singled out 11 types of passive diatheses differ from one another by existence /non-existence of additional semanticsyntactic correlations. The purpose of the study is to detect the additional semantic-syntactic correlations by which different diatheses in which the subject is in correlation with the addressee differ. In the article there is given a list of the singled out types of diatheses with a relative frequency of each of them, i.e. its share in the general volume of the selection. Each diathesis is provided with examples from the plays and the dialogic extracts of modern British and American authors. The variants of the passive diatheses are presented as schemes of correspondence of the participants of the situation to the members of the sentence.