Double Your Passive, Double Your Fun

Now that the trial of central Ohio freeway sniper Charles McCoy has resulted in a hung jury, prosecutors have decided not to try for the death penalty in the retrial. The news made me think back to a year ago, when it was announced that the death penalty would be sought. Franklin County prosecutor Ron O’Brien said:

We are alleging that there was a course of conduct over a period of time in which one person was killed and others were attempted to be killed.

I wrote about this sentence while I was still guest-blogging at Agoraphilia. I was struck by its passive marking on both the matrix verb (was attempted) and the embedded infinitive (to be killed)–something that makes less sense the more you try to parse it like any other passive, but which sounds pretty natural if you just go with it. Since then, I’ve been researching this construction, which I’m calling the Double Passive. It turns out it you can find it being done with many verbs that take infinitives. I now have 30 pages of attestations I’ve collected from doing Google searches for some form of be+[passive participle]+to be+[passive participle], plugging in various infinitive-taking verbs in the first slot. For example, for the verb forget, I searched for the phrases “{am, are, is, was, were, be, been, being} forgotten to be” (as 8 separate searches). Here are some of my favorites, chosen so as to illustrate that all forms of be can be used with the passivized matrix verbs:

1. I have one that shows you when people are trying to get on and I am attempted to be hacked at least once every time I go online.
   (link)

2. For custom orders, full payment must be received before the item is begun to be made.
   (link)

3. If any terms or conditions are failed to be followed it will result in grounds for immediate account deactivation.
   (link)

4. They are showing signs of abnormal tire wear, as tire rotation was neglected to be performed on time.
   (link)

5. I read The 10 Most Hated Tricks article, from April ’03 issue of Skateboarder, and was immediately alarmed when I saw how many tricks were forgotten to be hated on.
   (link)

6. In the future, soil will have to be preserved if food is to be continued to be grown.
   (link)

7. An exception I will allow here is if a pants-wetting or pants-pooping incident led to the boy being diapered or at least being threatened to be diapered.
   (link)

8. Slavery has been tried to be linked to homosexuality and homosexuality linked to slavery – it never should have been done.
   (link)

I’ve gotten so used to reading double passives by now that the above examples all sound pretty good to me, as long as I don’t try to shoehorn them into the kind of interpretation I’d give an ordinary passive. I can even imagine recursion with the double passive, though I haven’t looked for it: Others were intended to be attempted to be killed (i.e., someone intended to attept to kill others.) But even having come to know double passives, I still can’t accept them with any infinitive-taking verb. Most notably, seem doesn’t work: I can’t get *Others were seemed to be killed. I’ve found examples like that, but very few, and usually in text that’s clearly been written by a nonnative speaker.