The chapters collected in the volume Passives Cross-Linguistically provide analyses of passive constructions across different languages and populations from the interface perspectives between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. The contributions are, in principle, all based on the background of generative grammatical theory. In addition to the theoretical contributions of the first part of this volume, all solidly built on rich empirical bases, some experimental works are presented, which explore passives from a psycholinguistic perspective based on theoretical insights. The languages/language families covered in the contributions include South Asian languages (Odia/Indo-Aryan and Telugu/Dravidian, but also Kharia/Austro-Asiatic), Japanese, Arabic, English, German, Modern Greek, and several modern Romance varieties (Catalan, Romanian, and especially southern Italian dialects) as well as Vedic Sanskrit and Ancient Greek.
Kleanthes K. Grohmann, Ph.D. (2000), University of Maryland at College Park, is Professor of Biolinguistics at the University of Cyprus and the Director of the CAT Lab. He has published widely and is founding editor of the open-access journal Biolinguistics.
Akemi Matsuya, Ph.D. (2000), University of Maryland at College Park, is Professor of Linguistics at Takachiho University. She has publications in formal and applied linguistics and is one of the editors of Linguistic Journal.
Eva-Maria Remberger, Ph.D. (2003), Free University Berlin, is Professor of Romance Linguistics at the University of Vienna in Austria. Her research and publications concern grammar theoretical questions as they arise from Romance data in a comparative synchronic and diachronic view.
Editorial Foreword List of Figures and Tables Notes on Contributors
Introduction
âAkemi Matsuya and Kleanthes K. Grohmann
1 Long-Distance Passives by Structure Removal
âGereon Müller
2 On Passive and Perfect Participles
âPeter Hallman
3 On Deontic Passives
âEva-Maria Remberger
4 Indirect Object Want-Passives in Southern Italy
âAdam Ledgeway
5 Unexpected Passive Structures from Prepositional Verbs in Catalan
âIsabel CrespÃ
6 Two Types of Passive? Voice Morphology and âLow Passivesâ in Vedic Sanskrit and Ancient Greek
âLaura Grestenberger
7 Non-active Voices in South Asian Languages
âPritha Chandra, Gurmeet Kaur and Anindita Sahoo
8 A More Articulated Approach to Causativity Alternation
âMohamed Naji
9 Semantic and Pragmatic Implications of Passives
âAkemi Matsuya
10 The Source of Passive Sentence Difficulty: Task Effects and Predicate Semantics, Not Argument Order
âCaterina L. Paolazzi, Nino Grillo and Andrea Santi
11 Synthetic Passives in Early and Impaired Grammar: The View from Greek Reflexive Verbs
âArhonto Terzi
12 The Mirage of âImpaired Passivesâ and the Locus Preservation Hypothesis
âKleanthes K. Grohmann, Maria Kambanaros and Evelina Leivada
Index
All interested in modern approaches to passive constructions in both theoretical and empirical detail from different languages as well as psycholinguistic applications to language processing, acquisition, and pathology.