grammaticality - Why is this marked ungrammatical? "A new CD player was wanted by Ed."


Why is the second sentence below marked as being ungrammatical?




  1. Ed wanted a new CD player.


  2. ✲ A new CD player was wanted by Ed.


                        —Bas Aarts, English Syntax and Argumentation





Although the second sentence is marked as an ungrammatical one, it seems to make sense. Why does the author mark it as being ungrammatical?



Answer



In his ‘Oxford Modern English Grammar’, Aarts is less dogmatic, commenting that ‘not all verbs allow passivization to the same extent’, and gives as an example Tony likes films with lots of gratuitous violence. Certainly, Films with lots of gratuitous violence are liked by Tony is at best odd.


‘The Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English’ includes want and like in a list of verbs that occur less than 2% of the time, with the comment 'Although these verbs are possible as passives, they simply are not used in the passive very often.'


I am not hostile to the passive itself, but I cannot imagine circumstances in which I would want to use it to describe Ed’s desire for a new CD player. Even if it is grammatical, the passive use of verbs that are almost always used only in active constructions is probably best avoided, unless there is some very good reason for it.


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