This paper addresses the need for a comprehensive, corpus-based study of the prepositional passive in the recent past. Sets of prepositional passives from 1870 to 1999 were collected from the Corpus of Historical American English and compared with a control group of “regular” passive sentences. After presenting the diachronic frequency of prepositional passives over the time period, the study explores a number of special characteristics that have been suggested as being typical of the prepositional passive: lexicalization of verb + preposition, participle + noun + preposition combinations with light verbs such as made use of, coordination with another passive verb, “affectedness,” and the perceived significance of the subject referent. The results of the corpus-based investigation add new dimensions to our understanding of the construction’s use.

中文翻译：

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“必须研究”：介词被动语料库研究

本文解决了最近对介词被动进行全面的、基于语料库的研究的需要。从历史美国英语语料库中收集了 1870 年至 1999 年的介词被动句集，并与“常规”被动句对照组进行了比较。在展示了一段时间内介词被动词的历时频率后，该研究探讨了一些被认为是介词被动词典型的特殊特征：动词+介词的词汇化，分词+名词+介词组合与轻动词，如使用，与另一个被动动词“影响”协调，以及主体所指对象的感知意义。基于语料库的调查结果为我们对结构使用的理解增加了新的维度。