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Passive vs. unaccusative predicates: A phase-based account

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Abstract

This research article provides evidence from Jordanian Arabic (JA) that passive predicates, unlike unaccusative predicates, project phases. Two tests are formulated to demonstrate this difference, namely long-distance agreement (between T0 and the internal argument) and quantifier stranding. Following Alexiadou et al. (2006), Alexiadou and Doron (2012) and Bruening (2013), we attribute this difference between passive and unaccusative predicates to the presence of Voice Phrase in the former but not the latter. In so doing, this article challenges a number of assumptions that equally qualify passive and unaccusative predicates as phases, or lack thereof, in natural languages (see e.g., Chomsky 2000; Legate 2003; Centeno and Vicente 2008; Deal 2009).

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Notes

  1. Boeckx and Grohmann (2007) mention that phases are a rough reformulation and reincarnation of the notions of bounding nodes (Chomsky 1977) and barriers (Chomsky 1986).

  2. A number of researchers argue that other categories including PPs (Abels 2003) and DPs (Svenonius 2004; Hiraiwa 2005; Despić 2015) can be qualified as phases in some languages.

  3. JA has four subdialects which almost share similar syntactic structures (Cleveland 1963). The main differences between these subdialects lie in some socio-phonological respects and phraseology (Sakarna 2005; Al-Raba’a 2016). These differences are irrelevant to the main idea discussed in the current research.

  4. JA is a consistent pro-drop language because an unexpressed pronoun freely occurs with all persons in all tenses (Jarrah 2017a).

  5. In Standard Arabic, verbs display partial agreement (only in person and gender) with their non-pronominal subjects in VSO clauses, while they show full agreement (in person, gender, and number) with their subjects in SVO clauses (see Fassi Fehri 1993; Aoun et al. 1994; Soltan 2007; Jarrah 2019a for proposals).

  6. Leipzig Glossing Rules are used in this article.

  7. All examples mentioned in this article are provided by the author unless otherwise stated. See Sect. 2.2 for data collection and judgement.

  8. Note that when the verb has a word-internal gemination, it is passivized through the morpheme t, as shown in the following examples.

    • i.

      ʔassas

      > >

      ʔit-ʔassas

       

      establish.pst.3sg.m

      		 

      pass-establish.pst.3sg.m

       

      ‘established’

      		 

      ‘was established’

      ii.

      xasʕsʕasʕ

      > >

      ʔit-xasʕsʕasʕ

       

      allocate.pst.3sg.m

      		 

      pass-allocate.pst.3sg.m

       

      ‘allocated’

      		 

      ‘was allocated’

      iii.

      bi-ʔassis

      > >

      bi-t-ʔassas

       

      impfv-establish.3sg.m

      		 

      impef-pass-establish.3sg.m

       

      ‘establish’

      		 

      ‘is established’

      iv.

      bi-xasʕsʕisʕ

      > >

      bi-t-xasʕsʕasʕ

       

      impfv-allocate.3sg.m

      		 

      impef-pass-allocate.3sg.m

       

      ‘allocate’

      		 

      ‘is allocated’

    Note also that the passive morpheme t is not acceptable with intransitive verbs that has internal gemination.

    • v.

      saħħadʒ

      > >

      *ʔit-saħħadʒ

       

      clap.pst.3sg.m

      		 

      pass-clap.pst.3sg.m

       

      ‘clapped’

      		 

      ‘was clapped’

  9. The main differences between word orders in JA relate to the discourse status of the subject and the object, being topics or contrastive foci, etc. We do not discuss the interpretive differences between word order patterns of JA in this article; see Jarrah (2019b) and Jarrah and Abusalim (2021) for insights in this regard.

  10. One might wonder whether the subject of a transitive verb can appear postverbally in in ka:n clauses, given the structure in (12). It should be noted that the subject does not normally appear postverbally in JA grammar unless the the lexical verb is contrasted with another (overt or understood) element, as shown in the following example:

    • i.

      ka:n-t

      timtaħin

      mu:ʃ

      tilʕab

      sa:ra

      ʔimba:riħ

       

      be.PST-3SG.F

      take.exam.IMPFV.3SG.F

      not

      play.IMPFV.3SG.F

      Sarah

      yesterday

       

      ‘Sarah was taking an exam not playing (with her friends) yesterday.’

    Jarrah and Abusalim (2021) propose that the lexical verb in such cases moves to the head of Focus Phrase of the so-called low IP area (see Belletti 2004).

  11. In JA, as is the case in other Arabic varieties, verbs are always inflected for agreement with their subjects, even in situations where C0 is not merged (see Fassi Fehri 1993). Jarrah (2020) takes this as evidence that T0 in JA (and in other Arabic varieties) is independently endowed with uϕ-content, due to the effects of the postulated T0-ϕ-parameter, whose ON-setting makes the respective language free of non-finite verbs (T0 is always inflected for Agreement).

  12. The object in passive constructions may move to the left periphery as a contrastive focus, which is morphologically marked in Arabic grammar by virtue of movement (Moutaouakil 1989), as shown in the following example.

    • i.

      sijja:rah

      ka:n-t

      ʔib-t-in-ħarag

       

      car

      be.PST-3SG.F

      IMPFV-3SG.F-PASS-burn

       

      ‘It was a car [not a bus] that was being burned.’

    On the other hand, when the object in passive constructions expresses all-new information focus, the object is interestingly subject to the same restrictions of the position of the non-focused object in passive constructions, e.g., the object cannot appear postverbally when ka:n is used, as evidenced in (ii).

    • ii.

      Speaker A:

      ʃu

      fi:h

        

      what

      there

        

      ‘What is up?’

    •  

      Speaker B:

      (sijja:rah)

      ka:n-t

      (sijja:rah)

      ʔib-t-in-ħarag

      (*sijja:rah)

        

      car

      be.PST-3SG.F

      car

      IMPFV-3SG.F-PASS-burn

      car

        

      ‘A car was being burned.’

    The ban on the position of the focused object to occur in a postverbal position is significant as all-new information focus in Arabic is, unlike contrastive focus, not morphologically marked by movement; rather it remains in situ. Under our approach, the ban on the all-new-focused object to appear postverbally is enforced due to the effects of the strong PIC in JA grammar. The object moves to the edge of the phase, so its structural case is valued.

  13. This proposal directly implies that Arabic varieties behave like English in the present-tense clauses (the verb does not move to T0), but like French in the past-tense clauses (the verb moves to T0) in terms of V0-to-T0 movement.

  14. Chomsky (2007, 2008) allows the head of the phase to bequeath its uϕ-features to its non-phasal complement during sentence derivation (a proposal known as feature inheritance). Although the feature-inheritance system would allow for a uniform analysis that phasal heads are the locus of uϕ-features in that the ϕ-features of T0 are inherited from C0, several recent proposals that draw on data from different world languages argue against feature inheritance (see Carstens 2003; Haegeman and van Koppen 2012; Gallego 2014; Jarrah 2020). All of these authors supply evidence that C0 can retain its uϕ-features, while non-phasal heads (e.g., T0) are independently endowed with a set of uϕ-features.

  15. In passive sentences with the present tense, a locative PP can appear to the right of the object and the verb (the object must appear to the left of the verb) (see (ia)) or to the left of the object and the verb when it is interpreted as a topic (ib):

    1. (i)
      figure p

    This is expected as the verb in the present-tense sentences does not move to T0 but remains adjoined to v0. (This contrasts with passive sentences with a past-tense verb where the topical PP appears to the right of the verb and the left of the object). An entity that is located in the low IP area should appear on the surface to the left of the object and the verb that is adjoined to v0, hence the enforced interpretation of the locative PP as a topic in (ib).

  16. Note that for some consultants, the verb in all examples with a stranded quantifier should bear a resumptive pronoun that is co-indexed with the clitic, which is suffixed to the universal quantifier. Additionally, some consultants do not accept the examples with a universal quantifier that is pied-piped along with its associate wh-phrase. We will not comment on this interspeaker preference in this article.

  17. It should be noted that some consultants judge sentence (32) with a postverbal subject-related quantifier as partially grammatical if it is accompanied by emphasis.

  18. For some speakers, the clitic -ha (3SG.F) is more preferred than -hin (3PL.F) when the quantifier is associated with a non-human referent (i.e., things, animals, trees, etc.).

  19. In this paper, v*P is treated as corresponding to VoiceP.

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Acknowledgements

My sincere gratitude goes to Julie Anne Legate, Editor in Chief of Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, for her extensive comments and invaluable remarks regarding many aspects of my analysis of the data presented here. I would also like to thank anonymous reviewers for their constructive criticism and suggestions. I would also like to thank the audience at the Cambridge Workshop on Voice (which was held at the University of Cambridge in 2017), where an early version of this paper was presented. Their discussion of some data and issues mentioned in this article were helpful and stimulating.

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    Marwan Jarrah

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Jarrah, M. Passive vs. unaccusative predicates: A phase-based account. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 41, 1397–1424 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-023-09568-3

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