Different by-phrases with adjectival and verbal passives: Evidence from Spanish corpus data

• We present a statistical corpus data analysis of by-phrases with Spanish adjectival and verbal passives.
• Event-related by-phrases with adjectival passives contain a high number of weakly or non-referential nominals.
• Event-related by-phrases with verbal passives contain a high number of strongly referential nominals.
• State-related modifiers behave the same with both types of passives.
• Adjectival passives involve event kinds (and result state tokens), verbal passives event tokens.

We present a Spanish corpus data study that shows that event-related by-phrases in the two types of passives are qualitatively different with respect to the types of complements they take: with verbal passives we find more strongly referential nominals (e.g. proper names, pronouns, demonstratives, regular definites), whereas with adjectival passives, we mainly find weakly or non-referential nominals (e.g. indefinites, bare nominals, weak and generic definites). These differences comply with an account, according to which the event in adjectival passives remains in the kind domain, restricting event modification to kind modification. Furthermore, the data show that there are no qualitative differences in the complements we find in state-related by-phrases of either passive, which have the same properties as those in event-related ones with verbal passives. We take this fact to support the claim that there are two different kinds of by-phrases with adjectival passives: event-related ones which modify an event kind (the VP/PrtP before adjectivisation), and state-related ones which modify a state token (the AP).