A Collostructional Approach to the Concealed Passive Construction in English

This study investigates the English concealed passive construction (CPC), as in the car needs washing, using authentic corpus data. While previous research has explored certain aspects of the CPC, little attention has been given to strongly associated matrix verbs (or verb types) and interactions between matrix verbs (or verb types) and other elements of the construction. To address these issues, we apply three types of collostructional analysis, and our findings indicate that no single, straightforward pattern emerges with respect to real-life grammatical properties of the CPC. We then show that the well-known distinction between raising and control constructions, formalized in the framework of Construction Grammar (CxG), offers a more systematic account for the authentic properties of two subtypes of the CPC. We further argue that this raising vs. control contrast is not arbitrary but arises from the two senses of the verb need, which exhibits a particularly strong statistical association with the CPC.