Word.ws English Dictionary

pseudopassives

pseudopassives is the plural of pseudopassive.

Meaning of pseudopassive

Noun

pseudopassive (plural pseudopassives)

  1. A construction where the object of a preposition has been promoted to the role of subject, as in The problem was talked about.
    • Consider the English pseudo-passive in (4). (4) This bed has not been slept in for many years1991, Reineke Bok-Bennema, Case and Agreement in Inuit, Berlin: Foris, →ISBN, page 97
  2. A construction that removes the subject from an intransitive verb, as in the Dutch sentence Er wordt gefloten ("[Someone] whistled").
    • Consider now the pseudo-passive, Er werd gefloten "There was whistling." Here, just as in the true passive, the morphology asserts high participant not focussed.1976, Robert Kirsner, “On the subjectless 'pseudo-passive' in Standard Dutch and the semantics of background agents”, in Charles N. Li, editor, Subject and Topic, New York: Academic Press, →OCLC...

See all 5 meanings of pseudopassive

Questions about pseudopassives

What is pseudopassives the plural of?
Pseudopassives is the plural of pseudopassive.

Words near pseudopassives in the dictionary

  1. pseudoparenchyme
  2. pseudoparenchymes
  3. pseudoparticle
  4. pseudoparticles
  5. pseudopassive
  6. pseudopassives
  7. pseudopathological
  8. pseudopathologies
  9. pseudopathology
  10. pseudopatient
  11. pseudopatients

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pseudopassives (page history and authors); pseudopassive (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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