2015) or that the English and Greek passive are formed with distinct Voice heads ( pace Alexiadou & Doron 2012 Alexiadou et al.
Going through recent analyses of the Greek passive, the paper further shows that the interpretation and the overall distribution of Greek and English by-phrases do not exhibit the interpretive and distributional restrictions that were taken to support the view that they are merged as adjuncts ( pace Bruening 2013 Legate 2014 Alexiadou et al. Under this analysis, passive by-phrases are no different from oblique PPs of various languages which are standardly analyzed as arguments on the basis of the fact that they, as well, can bind. Based on the standard assumption since Chomsky ( 1981) that binding is only possible from A-positions, we propose that passive by-phrases exhibit properties of arguments because they are merged as external arguments just as in the active syntax. We take these facts to suggest that passive by-phrases share a common property across languages. Karlík 2020), have been shown to display the same binding behavior as in Greek and English.
Furthermore, passive by-phrases can bind a non-logophoric reflexive, differing from standard instances of adjunct PPs which, as we show, are unable to bind. This paper presents new evidence showing that the passive by-phrases of Greek and English behave like the DP arguments of the corresponding active sentences in two respects: first, they are assigned the same range of theta roles, such as agent, causer, instrument or experiencer. The paper suggests that the rules in question must be constrained by independent principles, such as Chomsky’s (1981, 1986) Theta Criterion. Lastly, it is argued that the rules of semantic composition, if applied as in Heim & Kratzer (1998) and Bruening (2013), make available more ways in which arguments can be merged than those which are actually attested. 2015 i.a.) or that Greek by-phrases systematically exhibit distinct behavior from the corresponding DP arguments of the active (Alexiadou et al. Furthermore, in light of the new data presented here, the paper discusses reasons for which the following proposals cannot be maintained: that the Greek and English passive are formed in a different manner, or with different Voice heads (Alexiadou & Doron 2012 i.a.), that by-phrases are merged as adjuncts (Bruening 2013 Legate 2014 Alexiadou et al.
In light of these findings, the paper reaches a number of independent conclusions such as that VoiceP, the projection responsible for the distinct morphological realization of the different Voice phenomena, does not introduce the external argument (Collins 2005 Merchant 2013 Manzini et al.
On the other hand, it is shown that PPs with non-argument theta-roles, that is, adjunct PPs, cannot. The analysis finds support in new data from Greek and English showing that, just like the DP arguments of the active, by-phrases bear the same range of theta roles and can bind a non-logophoric reflexive. This paper proposes an analysis in which passive by-phrases are merged as the arguments of the active with the corresponding theta roles (Hasegawa 1988 D’Hulst 1992 Mahajan 1994 Goodall 1997 1999 Caha 2009 Collins 2018a Roberts 2019 Karlík 2020 and Hallman 2020).