Passives and impersonals

Abstract

This paper argues that the term 'passive ' has been systematically misapplied to a class of impersonal constructions that suppress the realization of a syntactic subject. The reclassification of these constructions highlights a typological contrast between two types of verbal diathesis and clarifies the status of putative 'passives of unaccusatives ' and ' transitive passives ' in Balto-Finnic and Balto-Slavic. Impersonal verb forms differ from passives in two key respects : they are insensitive to the argument structure of a verb and can be formed from unergatives or unaccusatives, and they may retain direct objects. As with other subjectless forms of personal verbs, there is a strong tendency to interpret the suppressed subject of an impersonal as an indefinite human agent. Hence impersonalization is often felicitious only for verbs that select human subjects.

Case and word order in Lithuanian

“…newspaper-NOM.MASC As expected, the object can appear grammatically in complement position only in the accusative, as in (85), in which its Case is assigned locally by v. Our proposal takes advantage of the fact that the LE nominative is not the only nominative-object construction in Lithuanian. Interestingly, as discussed in Lavine (1999Lavine ( , 2000 and Blevins (2003), and references cited therein, nominative objects also occur in the evidential -ma/-ta construction. These are non-agreeing predicates, in that the -ma/-ta participle is frozen as such.…”

“…[47] Lavine (1999Lavine ( , 2000 argues, contra Blevins (2003), that Lithuanian -ma/-ta is personal, with an oblique genitive subject.…”

Passiva em Mundurukú (Tupí): uma interseção entre reflexivas/recíprocas e causativas de transitivo

“…Assim, do ponto de vista da tipologia de construções passivas (Meillet, 1948;Perlmutter & Postal, 1977revisado em 1983Givón, 1979;Shibatani, 1985;Blevins, 2003) 7 , o Mundurukú tem construção passiva: o agente perde grau de importância sintática e pragmática, o paciente torna-se sujeito gramatical, assumindo papéis reservados a essa função sintática, e passa a ser o constituinte pragmaticamente mais relevante, o verbo é intransitivizado 8 , e a ordem preferencial de palavras (SVOBL) explicita uma hierarquia sintático-pragmática entre o novo sujeito (paciente) e o antigo sujeito (agente).…”

The so-called possessive perfect in North Russian and the Circum-Baltic area. A diachronic and areal account

“…The so-called possessive perfect in the North Russian dialect (henceforth NR) has been subject to substantial research for a long time, cf., inter alia, Blevins (2003), Christen (1998), Danylenko (2005a), Holvoet (2001a), ), Kuz'mina and Nemčenko (1971, Lavine (1999), Maslov (1949), Matthews (1955), Matveenko (1961), Petrova (1961), Timberlake (1975), Tommola (2000), Trubinskij (1984), and Wiemer and Giger (2005:29-42). However, much less attention has been paid to its historical development, cf., inter alia, Ambrazas (1977), Borkovskij (1949), Borkovskij and Kuznecov (1963), Danylenko (2005a), , Kuteva and Heine (2004), Matthews (1955), Panzer (1984), and Potebnja (1888[1958, 1899 [1968]).…”