Sylvia Siqi Shi (QMUL) - 2025-26 Students
s.shi@qmul.ac.uk

Non-Active Voices: Do we have a universal schema?

This project explores a unified analysis for the structure and interpretation of Non-Active Voices across various languages. I consider passives, reflexives, middles and anticausatives, all of which exhibit a striking tendency to employ syncretic morphological forms crosslinguistically. Although these constructions differ semantically, their morphosyntactic syncretism motivates a unified analysis. Following Pesetsky and Torrego (2007), they are treated as syntactic indicators of argument structure, which “absorbs” the Nominative Case, thus giving rise to the absence of an External Argument and enabling the Internal Argument to surface as the grammatical subject. I then argue that this syncretism is not accidental or language-specific. Comparable patterns are attested cross-linguistically, including in typologically distinct and morphologically impoverished languages such as Mandarin, but seeking a unified analysis for Non-Active Voices consequently require an account of various challenges presented by Mandarin, particularly those presented by the long-distance coreference possibility of the Mandarin reflexive pronoun ziji and the puzzle of IA-raising in Mandarin passives.

Principal supervisor: Prof. David Adger