What explains English's lack of a distinct and unique passive inflectional marker distinct from other uses since ‘‑ed’ means so many things?

Question

I want to understand why English’s lack of a distinct, unique morphological marker for passive does not lead to misunderstandings. You use ‑ed for many things and this doesn’t bother you. Why not?

It doesn't matter whether it's whiz-delete (the tree planted in shade) or direct passive structure (the book is written). It's always the verb inflected into its past-tense form.

In other languages, like Turkish, there's always an explicit passive marker.

• Dik (il) en ağaç.
  Plant (passive marker) the tree**

• Bu ağaç gölgeye dik il di.
  This tree in shade plant (passive marker) ed(was) : This tree was planted in shade

So you must be perceiving the ‑ed suffixes used in adjectives, in the past tense of verbs, and in the past participles used in verbs and passive constructions differently even though these are all spelled the same. Because it's always planted for all of those! Is it that these are synonyms for both active and passive use? It's like black is really means either black or white defending only on context not on what letters you used to spell the word with.

I am not asking about the grammatical structure. I’m asking what your perception of so many different ‑ed suffixes that all mean different things is when you hear them said or read them written as native speakers.

Why do these ‘ambiguous synonyms’ not cause problems? Why do you keep using the same inflectional form based on a verb for many different ‘verby’ things and just expecting people to always know which of many identically spelled words you really meant?

I think native speakers must be approaching this very differently compared to how I am approaching it. Where am I going wrong? How can I think about this so that it no longer confuses me?

Answer 1

One might think that the difference between a preterite verb form (like wrote) and a past participial one (like written) is essentially that the former is "active" and the latter is "passive." If that were the case, English would have the exact problem you mention: for regular verbs, the active voice and passive voice forms would be identical, creating a great deal of ambiguity.

But that's probably not the best way of thinking about it. The main difference between them is that preterite verb forms are finite and inflected for tense, whereas past participial verb forms are non-finite, therefore tenseless and restricted to certain kinds of subordinate clauses. This is analogous to the way in which the plain (i.e. non-third-person-singular) present tense form of a verb is generally identical to its bare infinitive form. Since finite and non-finite verb forms generally occur in very different contexts, there isn't too much room for ambiguity.

It is true that non-finite clauses involving past participial verb forms generally have a passive interpretation. But not always: the major exception is with the perfective have, as in "He has written the book"; there "written the book" is a subordinate past-participial clause with an active voice interpretation. Likewise, not all clauses with a passive interpretation involve past participles: in "The fence needs painting," the clause "painting" has a gerund-participial verb form but is still given a passive interpretation.

That said, there are certainly some cases of genuine ambiguity: take the sentence "They feared the prisoners killed," where we could interpret "the prisoners killed" either as a finite subordinate clause or as a direct object followed by a non-finite past-participial clause. In those cases, you need context--or noun case, since "They feared him killed" and "They feared he killed" lack the same ambiguity.

(The terminology I'm using, and the general approach, come from CGEL, but they don't present it as explicitly as I have above.)

Answer 2

Even though the form of the word "planted" is the same, we understand its different meanings based on context. Context is used often in language: for example, whenever there are homophones like "sea" or "see", or "flower" and "flour", we need to use context to know which word we are hearing. So in most contexts, English speakers easily understand whether a passive or active meaning is meant and don't even think about it. It is harder for learners to use context since a language learner doesn't start out with as much background knowledge about vocabulary or word order rules.

Some of that context is based on the meaning of the preceding words. When "planted" is used as an active past-tense verb, it normally has a subject that is a person, like "The gardeners planted trees" or "The students planted tomato plants." But "This tree" or "Trees" are not people, so they aren't very likely to be the subject of a verb like planted—whereas they are common as its object.

Some of that context is based on the words that follow the word "planted". When "planted" is used as an active past-tense verb, it is usually followed by a noun phrase that acts as the direct object. You see that in the examples "The gardeners planted trees" or "The students planted tomato plants." But in a sentence like "Trees planted in shade don't grow well", the word "planted" is not followed by an object: instead, it's directly followed by a prepositional phrase ("in shade") and then a verb.

There's another rule of word order that helps us guess based on the words that come after "planted". Passive participles ending in "-ed" are usually placed after the noun that they modify only if the participle has modifiers coming after it, like the prepositional phrase "in shade" in the phrase "trees planted in shade". When a passive participle is used by itself, or when it only has modifiers before it, it usually comes before the modified noun (e.g. we say "the recently planted trees").

There are different considerations for different verbs, but these kinds of contextual clues exist in many cases.