Impersonal passives

We propose two binary-valued lexical features of passive morphemes and show that the interaction of the values assigned to these features for the passive morpheme(s) in a language explains the cross-linguistic possibilities for impersonal and in situ transitive passive formation. One feature marks a passive morpheme as a +/— theta-role bearer. The second feature determines whether it is a +/— strong Case absorber. We show that our lexical-feature-based account of the main syntactic properties of passive morphemes provides a more comprehensive and unified explanation of the facts of passivization in a wide variety of languages than competing Case-based theories. © 1993 Walter de Gruyter