Passivereflexivereading

Passivereflexivereading is a proposed reading-processing concept in cognitive linguistics that describes how some readers interpret text by leveraging both reflexive cues and passive constructions. The idea is that reflexive forms (such as themselves, himself, themselves) and the foregrounding of patients or themes in passive sentences guide the reader’s construction of event structure and reference, sometimes with reduced emphasis on identifying the agent.

The term combines two familiar ideas. Passive voice often shifts focus from the agent to the patient or theme, while reflexive pronouns create explicit or implicit links between entities within a sentence. Passivereflexivereading posits that, for certain readers or in certain contexts, these cues are used cooperatively to establish coreference and role assignment more quickly or with different attentional emphasis than in active-voice processing. This can influence how readers allocate processing resources, predict upcoming material, and encode information into memory.

Research on passivereflexivereading is exploratory and draws on methods from psycholinguistics, such as reading-time measurements and eye-tracking, to examine whether reflexive cues and passive syntax jointly affect comprehension. Critics caution that the concept overlaps with broader accounts of syntactic processing and coreference resolution, and that more robust empirical work is needed to delineate its boundaries and conditions.

See also: passive voice, reflexive pronouns, anaphora resolution, sentence processing, binding theory.