Oblique passives, Voice, and PPs

This talk builds on work with Tomoko Ishizuka “On the (non-accidental) homophony of -rare in passives and (psv-)potentials: insights from Japanese oblique passives)(2025)”. I will focus on a number of questions we did not address previously. These are centered on locative (adjunct) and instrumental passives, Voice and PPs. After a quick recap of the basis data, generalizations, and analysis, we address the following questions:

• The syntactic hierarchy for Japanese (basically capturing the order-of- operations in a decompositional bottom- up-syntax, with surface constituency the output (not the input) of the syntactic derivation), locates the thematic subject below instrumentals and locatives, and is moved to a non thematic subject position above locative and instrumental PPs. This hierarchy is incompatible with Pylkkanen (2008)’s influential proposal. She locates the merge location of (active) Voice/the thematic position of the external argument above high applicatives (which include locative and instrumental DPs in Bantu languages). Her main justification is syntactic.
• The main question therefore is it can be shown that the thematic subject position is above or below locative and instrumentals.
  • We present new empirical evidence in support of our proposal, drawing on locative and instrumental ’passives’ in Malagasy (Western Austronesian), and ciCewa (Bantu).
• This will raise further questions about the label Voice, the nature of Voice, Applicatives and PPs, as well as questions of comparative syntax.
• In the languages we discuss (Malagasy, Bantu, Japanese), oblique DPs alternate with full PPs; Oblique DPs interact with Voice systems/Case, but full PPs do not. Finally Oblique DPs and the related full PPs show different distributional properties. Oblique DPs appear in A-positions, oblique PPs in positions c-commanded by agent/themes/VPs (as seen in ellipsis) at the end of the derivation.
• Why? Two options depending on the treatment of PPs: not: (i) full PPS are the input of the derivation (as in traditional grammars and phrase structure grammars), and the absence of P is accounted for in some way. Incorporation? (This never worked well); yes: (ii) Full PPs are the output of the syntactic derivation (a much more recent approach, dating back to Kayne, 1994, 2000-2010). In such a theory, oblique DPs are a subpart of full PPs, and can be ”grown” into a full PP. We will show how the way PPs are formed solves the problem that instrumentals and locatives DPs (oblique DPs) are merged above the external argument, but when they grow into ”full PPs”, they are ”demoted” ending up in the c-command domain of the subject (and object), i.e below the grammatical subject position.
• Finally, time permitting we address why some languages allow oblique passives/pseudopassives, and other languages not, and construct a (hypothetical) typology of oblique passives,  based on the data, and theory we presented.