Passivisation in Semitic, Iranian, Armenian, and Beyond
About this ebook
The chapters explore the rich typological variation of passive voice constructions, examining their typological traits, synchronic microvariation and diachronic developments. Drawing on Siewierska’s definition, the studies investigate processes of agent demotion and patient promotion, reductions in transitivity, and the fuzzy boundaries between passive and other detransitivisation strategies such as middles, anticausatives, statives and light verbs as well as impersonal subjects and agent omission. They also shed light on the impact of text genre, verbal aspect, and language contact on passivisation.
By integrating theoretical, typological, historical, and areal perspectives, the volume discusses the internal stability of detransitivisation strategies, their evolution from earlier source constructions, and their position in voice systems more broadly. It raises fundamental questions about whether cross-linguistic tendencies in passives reflect universal patterns or area-specific historical contingencies.
This collection thus provides an essential resource for scholars of all theoretical persuasions that are interested in voice and valency and/or in Western Asia’s linguistic diversity, while foregrounding the pressing need to support communities whose linguistic heritage is at risk.
About the author
(PhD, Leiden University, 2018) is a Research Associate in Hebrew and Aramaic Studies at the University of Cambridge and Lecturer in Hebrew and Aramaic at Leiden University. He has published widely on Semitic languages, both ancient and modern. His main research concerns the typology of endangered Neo-Aramaic dialects from an areal-diachronic perspective. He is a laureate of a Rubicon Fellowship awarded by the Dutch Research Council and is the author of Ergativity and Other Alignment Types in Neo-Aramaic: Investigating Morphosyntactic Microvariation (Leiden: Brill, 2021).
(PhD, Goethe University Frankfurt, 2021) is a Research Fellow at the Johanna Quandt Young Academy at the Goethe University Frankfurt (JQYA), where he explores interdisciplinary applications of his linguistic research. He specialises in comparative and corpus-based linguistic analysis of Iranian and non-Iranian languages, with a focus on morphosyntax. His current research examines language production mechanisms in Kurdish varieties, Persian, Armenian, Neo-Aramaic, and Azeri-Turkic, integrating natural language corpus data (both fieldwork and published sources) with experimental results. He is actively involved in the development of treebanks for several Kurdish varieties within the Universal Dependencies framework, and is supervising the development of treebanks for other low-resource Iranian languages at Saarland University.
