The Information Structure and Typological Peculiarities of the Georgian Passive Constructions

Abstract

Functionally defined Passive Constructions are characterized as the conversive ones of corresponding active constructions, where a patient is promoted to the subject position, and an agent is demoted and transformed into a prepositional phrase. Georgian passive constructions do not always show such a conversion and actually express a variety of semantics: deponents, reflexives, reciprocals, potentials, etc. The peculiarities of Georgian passive define the restrictions of their usage in the processes of information structuring, where patient foregrounding implies certain morphosyntactic changes characteristic for conversive-passive constructions. The analysis of the Georgian sentence information structure provides a strong argument for interpreting Georgian passive as a grammatical category mostly governed by cognitive-semantic, and not simply by syntactic, features. This paper suggests a cognitive productive model and some semantic features that define the choice of either the passive or active formal models for grammatical representations of verbs showing so-called medial semantics.

This paper is a product of the project “Typology of information structure,” which is part of the SFB 632 “Information structure” at the University of Potsdam and Humboldt University Berlin, sponsored by the DFG.