Feature GB147: Is there a morphological passive marked on the lexical verb?

Patrons: Jakob Lesage

Description ⇫

Summary

Passivization is a detransitivizing operation that takes a transitive clause (The dog bites the man.) and turns it into an intransitive clause by promoting the P argument (the man) to morphosyntactic S function. In the resulting intransitive clause, the former A argument (the dog) either vanishes or adopts an oblique function: The man is bitten (by the dog). ‘Mediopassives’, ‘anticausatives’ and the sort (e.g. ‘x breaks the vase’ > ‘the vase breaks’) also count as passives. This question targets phonologically bound passive markers on lexical verbs. Anything that happens with auxiliaries is irrelevant here.

Sometimes a language uses a combination of an auxiliary and a special form of the verb to express passive clauses. This verb form may be called a 'participle' or 'infinitive'. If such participial or infinitival forms are morphologically marked (that is, they are not unmarked/zero-marked), they also trigger a 1 for this feature.

Procedure

  1. Code 1 if a source mentions a phonologically bound morpheme that marks passive clauses.
  2. Code 1 if there is no information on phonological (in)dependence but the relevant passivizing marker (auxiliary or particle) is orthographically bound to the verb. Add a comment that your analysis is based on orthography here.
  3. Code 1 if you identify a phonologically bound passive marker in the examples/texts provided in a source. Investigate sections on verb morphology, valency change and argument structure.
  4. Code 0 if a source mentions that there is no passive.
  5. Code 0 if a source mentions a phonologically free passive marker or other means of passivization, but none that are phonologically bound to the verb
  6. Code 0 if a grammar treats other valency changing operations in considerable depth but does not mention passive constructions.
  7. Code ? if there are examples that contain a potential passivizing construction but their analysis remains inconclusive.
  8. Code ? if there are no sources treating valency changing operations in the language or if treatment of them is very limited.

Examples

Udihe (ISO 639-3: ude, Glottolog: udih1248)

Udihe has a morphological passive, which is formed with the suffix -u. Udihe is coded 1 for this feature.

si      min-du   gida-si-u-zeŋe-i
you     me-DAT   spear-V-PASS-FUT-2SG
‘You will be killed by me.’ (Nikolaeva & Tolskaya 2001: 572–582)

Jamaican Creole English (ISO 639-3: jam, Glottolog: jama1262)

Passives in Jamaican Creole English are formed with the particle get. Jamaican Creole English is coded 0 for this feature.

Op   tu   nou   dem   no     nuo    ou   di    fuud    get     kuk.
up   to   now   3PL   NEG    know   how  DET   food    PASS    cook
‘Even now they still don't know how the food was cooked.’ (Farquharson 2013: 86)

Bongili (ISO 639-3: bui, Glottolog: bong1284)

According to Mangulu (2008), Bongili only forms passives by means of a word order change.

"Le passif est rendu ... par l'antéposition du patient avec ou sans pronominalisation redondante..." (Mangulu 2008: 30).

Bongili is coded 0 for this feature.

a. Active:
ɓa-bom-ák-á            moto   yáná
3PL-kill-PST-DIST.PST  man    yesterday
‘They killed a man yesterday.’ (Mangulu 2008: 30)

b. Passive:
moto    ɓa-bom-ák-á            yáná
man     3PL-kill-PST-DIST.PST  yesterday
‘A man was killed yesterday.’ (Mangulu 2008: 30)

Kuku-Uwanh (ISO 639-3: uwa, Glottolog: kuku1280)

For Kuku-Uwanh, authors Smith & Johnson (2000) explicitly mention that there is no passive or antipassive construction:

"Nganhcara lacks passive or antipassive constructions. Free word order and the optional omission of constituents allows Nganhcara to achieve the discourse functions of these formations without morphological apparatus" (Smith & Johnson 2000: 425).

It is coded 0.

Further reading

Haspelmath, Martin. 1990. The grammaticization of passive morphology. Studies in Language, 14(1). 25–72.

Keenan, Edward L. & Matthew S. Dryer. 2007. Passive in the world’s languages. In Timothy Shopen (ed.), Language typology and syntactic description, volume I: Clause structure (Second Edition), 325–361. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Siewierska, Anna. 2013. Passive constructions. In Matthew S. Dryer & Martin Haspelmath (eds), The world atlas of language structures online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

Zúñiga, Fernando & Seppo Kittilä. 2019. Grammatical voice. (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

References

Farquharson, Joseph T. 2013. Jamaican. In Susanne Maria Michaelis, Philippe Maurer, Martin Haspelmath & Magnus Huber (eds), The survey of pidgin and creole languages. Volume 1: English-based and Dutch-based Languages, 81–91. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Mangulu, André Motingea. 2008. Aspects du bongili de la Sangha-Likouala, suivis de l'esquisse du parler énga de Mampoko, Lulonga. (Language monograph series, 4.) Tokyo: Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa (ILCAA), Tokyo University of Foreign Studies.

Nikolaeva, Irina & Maria Tolskaya. 2001. A grammar of Udihe. (Mouton Grammar Library, 22.) Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Smith, Ian & Steve Johnson. 2000. Kugu Nganhcara. In R. M. W. Dixon & Barry Blake (eds), Handbook of Australian languages, 357–507. Oxford: Oxford University Press.


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0 absent 1114
1 present 829
? Not known 488
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Values ⇫

Name Glottocode Family Macroarea Contributor Value Source Comment