A Typology of Japanese Passives

Abstract

This article proposes and argues for a new typology of Japanese passives, making the following seven claims. [I] Japanese passives are classified into [1] patient passives and [2] experiencer passives, each with several subtypes. [II] The passive morpheme rareru is an auxiliary verb that takes two obligatory arguments and one optional argument. At the levels of both syntax and semantics, passives of type [2] have hierarchically higher structures than passives of type [1]. Of the [2]-type passives, some subtypes ([A] direct and [B] possessive1) have more basic and less complex structures than others ([C] possessive2 and [D] indirect). [III] Semantic binding plays a crucial role in every (sub)type. [IV] Affectedness, an essential property of passives, is characterized jointly in terms of six licensing conditions and three hierarchies. [V] The prototype of Japanese passives is a set of sentences of the [2A] type, with subjective construal and an expressive function. [VI] Their prototypicality is derived as a theorem from the triple affectedness hierarchy. [VII] The non-prototypical (sub)types are also explained in a principled way, with the introduction of general criteria/procedures for measuring the degree of derivativeness of patients and complex event/predicate sentences.