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This chapter offers a detailed description of the formal properties of English passive constructions. Passive sentences are systematically related to active sentences. After reviewing core properties of the passive constructions in English, we discuss the major features of prior transformational analyses and the empirical problems that prevent them from capturing regularities, as well as peculiarities, of English passive constructions. To avoid analytical problems arising from transformational analyses, this chapter suggests a construction-based analysis of be-passives that leverages multiple grammatical properties, including those related to grammatical categories, grammatical functions, and semantic/pragmatic constraints. This analysis has been extended to the prepositional passive as well as get-passive constructions, both of which behave differently from the be-passive constructions. We see that the construction-based framework offers a way to account for relations of ‘family resemblance’ that unite seemingly divergent constructions.
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