A Modular Approach to Personal, Impeasonal and some Partially Passive Constructions＊

In addition to the personal passive construction, characterized by the presence of a specific passive morpheme and the agent phrase as well as the advancement of the direct object to the subject, natural languages permit various constructions having only some of these defining properties. If the similarities and differences between the typical personal passives and such “partially” passive constructions are to be explained in a principled manner, the complex of phenomena traditionally called “passive” must be thought of as consisting of certain independent processes. Among the competing theories of “passive” found in the literature, the modular analysis proposed in the Government and Binding theory seems to have just the right property, explaining a range of phenomena which would pose rather difficult problems for other theories. Of particular importance is the so-called Impersonal Passive construction, which win be shown in section 3 to provide a direct piece of evidence for the modular theory wherein Passive Morphology is analyzed as having the two crucial properties of Cas-absorption and θ-marking-suspension