| dc.description.abstract | Using the Minimalist Program (Radford, 2004, 2009), this thesis compares Lithuanian verbal personal and impersonal passives with English counterparts, and investigates Lithuanian passive-like constructions. This study is of interest because not much research has been done about Lithuanian passives and there are differences concerning what verbs can be passivised in both languages. Timberlake (1982) argues that Lithuanian allows passives of unaccusatives, which are verbs whose subject is an underlying object, and already passivised predicates, while English does not permit these types of passives.
This analysis distinguishes between verbal passives and adjectival passives. In Lithuanian, as in English, verbal passives with eventive verbs denote an actional reading, while adjectival passives with eventive verbs have a statal reading. It is also shown that while English canonical passives are derived by a tense auxiliary (T) agreeing with a subject, Lithuanian counterparts are formed by ‘covaluation’ (Bhatt, 2005) operation where T, a passive participle and a subject enter into a multiple ‘Agree’ relation. English impersonal passives are formed with verbs which lack an active goal. Lithuanian impersonal passives of transitives include ‘defective intervener’ (Chomsky, 2000), ma/ta participle, which allows T to agree only with third person subjects. Unlike English, Lithuanian permits passives of unergatives that have a null expletive subject (proexpl). Lithuanian passive-like constructions, which are claimed to be passives by Timberlake (1982), are not passives, but non-finite inferential evidentials with an oblique genitive subject. This study suggests that Lithuanian, like English, does not allow passives of verbs lacking an external argument. | nb_NO |
