Rethinking Active and Passive in English: What Linguistics Got Wrong About Voice

For more than sixty years, modern syntax has treated the passive as a transformation of the active-an operation involving movement, suppression, or lexical remapping. Rethinking Active and Passive in English overturns that assumption. This book advances a bold, testable claim: active and passive clauses are not derivationally related at all. They are parallel surface realizations of a single, invariant operator-stack. Once operators-not verbs-are recognized as the true licensors of internal arguments, the long-standing puzzles of English prepositional passives fall into place. Promotion from within PP, pseudo-passive variability, and the apparent "exceptions" that have troubled verb-centric theories emerge as predictable consequences of operator geometry. Drawing on evidence from processing, corpus distribution, acquisition, neurolinguistics, typology, and diachrony, the book builds a six-pillar empirical case for a new architecture of voice. The result is a unified, formally explicit alternative to derivational and mapping accounts-one that eliminates stipulation, clarifies the structure of English V+P complexes, and reframes voice as a surface mapping over stable relational geometry. Clear, rigorous, and methodologically executable, Rethinking Active and Passive in English offers a decisive rethinking of how grammar encodes argument structure. It is essential reading for linguists seeking a precise, evidence-driven account of voice and its place in the architecture of syntax.