ABSTRACT
The passive is frequently associated with contact effects in other Romance languages such as Italian and Spanish. The predicted effects revolve around the fact that the passive is more frequent in English than in these Romance languages. Two consequences are envisaged: first that the frequency of the passive will increase, and second that there will be changes to the structure at the formal level. Observers interested in other Romance languages have been more likely to cite the passive as a locus of English influence than the preposed adjective. In the case of the passive in Spanish, there have been slightly more discussions of the question of English influence. The syntactically parallel ser passive is used less frequently than its counterparts in French and Italian but it has been suggested that it too will increase in frequency because of contact with English.
