1. Introduction

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. 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. Importantly, the passive by-phrases (vs. adjunct PPs) of other languages e.g. Czech (cf. Karlík 2020), have been shown to display the same binding behavior as in Greek and English. We take these facts to suggest that passive by-phrases share a common property across languages. 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. 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.

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. 2015) or that the English and Greek passive are formed with distinct Voice heads (pace Alexiadou & Doron 2012; Alexiadou et al. 2015 i.a.). Furthermore, since, as shown here, by-phrases are arguments, the view that the non-active morphology of Greek passive marks the absence of the external argument (Embick 1998; Alexiadou et al 2015 i.a.) is untenable. 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. The paper suggests that the rules in question must be constrained by independent principles, such as Chomsky’s (1981, 1986) Theta Criterion.

We begin with background discussion on Greek non-active morphology and the different contexts in which it is encountered (Section 2). Section 3 shows that Greek by-phrases can receive the same interpretations as the corresponding DP arguments of the active. This section focuses primarily on causer by-phrases, which, as shown, are compatible with the Greek passive (pace Alexiadou et al. 2015 i.a.). Section 4 introduces binding data showing that the Greek and English by-phrases can bind non-logophoric reflexives and Section 5 presents the analysis. Section 6 and 7 discuss previous analyses according to which, first, the Greek and English passive are formed in distinct ways and, second, the by-phrases are merged as adjuncts. We give reasons for which we do not consider these analyses to provide a satisfactory account of the range of facts they consider or the binding data we present. Section 8 is a short note on deponent verbs, which, as discussed, have not received a principled account in the theories assuming that non-active morphology is the spell-out of a Voice head lacking a specifier. Section 9 presents a short remark on the Theta Criterion. Section 10 concludes.

2. Background

Greek passives involve non-active morphology on the finite verb, rather than the auxiliary and participle of English. Thus, we see in (1a) the verb inflected for active morphology and present tense, and in (1b) and (1c) that the verb combines with a portmanteau suffix encoding non-active and present or past tense. This morphology is found in different contexts, such as reflexive and reciprocal, (2a–2b), middle, (2c), and deponent, (2d).¹

The Greek non-active morphology is also used in the formation of anticausative predicates, such as lero-thike ‘got dirty’ in (3). Note, however, that some anticausatives may also appear with active morphology. Hence, compare the non-active lero-thike in (3) to the active espase ‘broke’ in (4).

With this background in mind, we are now in a position to examine the syntactic behavior of the passive by-phrases in both Greek and English. We first show that Greek by-phrases can realize the range of theta-roles of the corresponding arguments in the active voice. Building on this finding, we demonstrate next that, exactly like the corresponding arguments in the active sentences, passive by-phrases of Greek and English can participate in binding dependencies.

3. By-phrases and their theta-roles

Greek passive by-phrases can be interpreted as agents, (5), experiencers, (6–7), recipients, (8), instruments, (9) (cf. Alexiadou & Schäfer 2006; Alexiadou & Anagnostopoulou 2009). We add that they can also host the subject of idiomatic expressions, (10) (on the range of interpretations of the English by-phrases, see Jaeggli 1986: 599; Baker, Johnson & Roberts 1989: 221 and Collins 2005: 2).

In what follows we show that the passive by-phrases of Greek can also be interpreted as causers. This is not an easy task as passive verbs can easily be confused with anticausatives, which, as (3) and (4) show, can also accept modification by causer by-phrases. In order to ensure that the verbs we examine are unambiguously passive, and not anticausative with non-active morphology, we use two well established diagnostics: (i) modification by by itself, (ii) compatibility with agent-oriented modifiers. As Alexiadou et al. (2015: 21) note, based on previous literature (cf. Chierchia 1989; 2004; Levin & Rappaport Hovav 1995), by itself is licensed “[…] in anticausatives, but not in passives.” This contrast between passives and anticausatives is illustrated below:

Thus, if a verb rejects a by itself PP, chances are that it is not an anticausative verb, but a passive. As for agent-oriented modifiers, the consensus is that they are rejected by anticausative predicates, (13), whereas they are compatible with the passives, (14) (cf. Zombolou 2004, and Alexiadou & Anagnostopoulou 2004: 131 i.a.).

Having the above in mind, let us now consider the following set of examples with the verbs apodhiorganothike ‘was disorganized’ and katalithike ‘was eradicated’.

(15a) shows that the verbs apodhiorganothike and katalithike cannot be modified by by itself, providing evidence that it does not form an anticausative. This conclusion is further strengthened by the fact that, unlike anticausative predicates, apodhiorganothike and katalithike can be modified by an agent-oriented adverb, (15b). Given (15a) and (15b), it makes sense to assume that apodhiorganothike and katalithike are unambiguous passive verbs. Importantly, (15c) shows that the same verbs are compatible with a causer PP, which clearly suggests that Greek passives can license causer PPs. This conclusion is further supported by additional verbs, such as metaferthike ‘was transferred’, (16), amavrothike ‘was tarnished’, (17) and vaftike ‘was painted’, (18). As shown below, metaferthike, amavrothike and vaftike are not compatible with by itself, while, they accept modification by agent-oriented adverbs and can license causer by-phrases.

Notice that there are verbs that distinguish the passive from the anticausative variant morphologically. These verbs are inflected with non-active morphology in the passive variant, (19a), whereas the anticausative is expressed with active morphology, (19b).

(19) shows that causer by-phrases are only possible with the anticausative form. It is the behavior of precisely this class of verbs that led Alexiadou & Schäfer (2006), Alexiadou & Anagnostopoulou (2009), Alexiadou et al. (2015) to the conclusion that the Greek passive totally blocks causer by-phrases. This conclusion is not supported by the behavior of the verbs in (15–18), which, crucially, do not exhibit the anticausative alternation.² We take this fact to suggest that there are confounds in the behavior of verbs exhibiting the anticausative alternation, as e.g. stegnothikan ‘were dried’ in (19a), and as a result of this, they cannot reveal in a straightforward manner what theta roles the Greek passive by-phrases may or may not have.³

We turn next to new binding data, which establish one of the main points of the paper, namely, that, just like the corresponding arguments in the active sentences, by-phrases can bind a reflexive. In this respect, by-phrases differ from standard cases of adjunct PPs, which, as we discuss, exhibit distinct behavior in terms of their binding possibilities. We begin the next section with a brief overview of the properties of the Greek reflexive.

4. Binding Data

5. The analysis

In the previous sections we presented data from two languages, Greek and English, in which DPs in the by-phrases of passives are assigned the theta-role assigned by the predicate to the external argument in the active. We take this fact to speak in favor of the idea that by-phrases are merged as arguments, just as in Roberts (2019: 437). Roberts adds a number of theoretical considerations in support of this view, concretely, he argues that “It would be an extraordinary coincidence that an adjunct preposition like by can do this [assign the same theta roles to the external argument as in the active], and would require a major complication of any account of how an EA is assigned its compositional θ-role. But this follows straightforwardly on the present analysis. In fact, an appropriately strong version of the Uniformity of Theta-role Assignment Hypothesis (UTAH; Baker 1988, 1997) requires exactly this. Furthermore, no mechanism of ‘θ-transmission’ (Jaeggli 1986), second-order c-selection (for Voice with an unchecked/unsaturated feature) combined with the stipulation that by (alone among ‘Voice adjuncts’ with the second-order selection property) ‘takes a function with an open argument and supplies its own argument to saturate that function’ (Bruening 2013: 24), or, in a similar vein, restriction of an existentially closed variable by an argument in an adjunct of the kind envisaged by Legate (2014) need be assumed.”

Another fact that the previous sections brought to light is that, in contrast to adjunct PPs, by-phrases can bind non-exempt anaphors just like the corresponding arguments in the active can. Importantly, non-exempt anaphors like o eaftos mu or inanimate anaphors as in (35)–(47) need to be bound, given the standard formulation of Principle A of Binding Theory (Chomsky 1986, and see Sportiche et al. 2013, 168 below for a more recent formulation):

In the examples repeated below, we show again that the reflexive cannot be bound by an adjunct PP, (49b). On the other hand, it can be bound by the by-phrase, (49a):

Since the by-phrases of Greek and English behave just like the corresponding DP arguments of the active verbs in terms of binding, it makes sense to assume that in both languages, they are merged as arguments occupying the same position as the external argument DP in the active (cf. Hasegawa 1988; D’Hulst 1992; Mahajan 1994; Goodall 1997; 1999; Caha 2009; Collins 2018a; Roberts 2019; Karlík 2020; Hallman 2020). These claims build on the standard assumption that binding is only possible from A-positions (cf. Chomsky 1981:184, “The theory of binding is a theory of A-binding.”).¹⁰ Hence, the underlying structure we propose for the Greek and, crucially, English passives as well, is as in (50) (see Collins 2005 and Roberts 2019: 430–9):¹¹

(50)

Under our analysis it is the PP that binds the reflexive in (50), as it is the external argument which, as such, c-commands the reflexive. There is, however, a problem that arises for this approach: example (49a) shows that the reflexive agrees syntactically with its antecedent. However, since the apo-phrase lacks phi-features this should not be possible. Collins (2018a) suggests that this issue can be resolved in the framework for pronominal agreement advocated in Collins & Postal (2012), where pronominal agreement originates in a small set of sources (which include antecedents).

In order to see how pronominal agreement works in Collins & Postal (2012), let us consider the following example:

In (52), the reflexive pronoun is bound by the copy/trace of who in the embedded subject position. Nonetheless, who is third person singular, as shown by the subject verb agreement. In this case, when the reflexive is myself it does not agree with the DP that binds it, but agrees with some other DP (the subject of the matrix clause). Collins & Postal (2012) call the DPs that potentially supply phi-features for pronominal agreement sources. In (52), the two sources are the DPs I and who. In order to account for the pronominal agreement facts in cases like (49a) under the theory of Collins & Postal (2012), Collins (2018a) proposes that the DP complement of functional Ps can function as a source of phi-features:

We assume, as in Michelioudakis & Angelopoulos (2019) and Angelopoulos (2019a), that apo ‘by’ of Greek is a functional preposition and that it is not responsible for the theta-role interpretation of its surface DP complement (see also Alexiadou & Anagnostopoulou 2009 on the latter). Given this, the fact that the DP contained in the Greek (and English) by-phrases can function as a source of phi-features follows directly from (53). Other functional prepositions, such as of or to of English, and Greek prepositions, such as se ‘to’ or me ‘with’, are predicted to also be merged in an argument position together with their DP complement and bind a reflexive. Indeed, this prediction is borne out in (54) which shows that, just like with apo-phrases, the PP formed with s(e) can bind the Greek reflexive (cf. Anagnostopoulou 2003; Michelioudakis 2012):

Let us now consider the cases in which the complement of an adjunct P cannot bind a reflexive, that is, sentences such as (29b), (30b), (31b), (32a). There are two relevant structures to consider for a PP headed by a P such as without:

(55a) and (55b) show that there can be many reasons for which the sentences in (29b), (30b), (31b), (32a) are ungrammatical. In (55a) the without PP as a whole cannot bind the reflexive. This follows from the fact that binding is not possible from adjunct positions. Second, the PP cannot function as a source of pronominal agreement for the reflexive because without is not a functional preposition. Third, the PP is not even the right semantic type to bind a pronoun. Since the pronoun is of type <e>, its antecedent should also be of type <e>, but that is not the case with without-phrases or other adjuncts (which are presumably predicative). Lastly, in (55b), the DP contained in the without PP is not able to bind the reflexive due to lack of c-command.¹²¹³

With this in mind, let us now turn our attention to the analyses according to which the by-phrase is merged as an adjunct. These analyses also claim that:

1. the Greek and English passives are built in distinct ways,

2. Greek non-active morphology is the spell-out of a Voice head lacking a specifier,

3. unlike the corresponding DP arguments of the active, the distribution of passive by-phrases is severely restricted.

We discuss reasons for which we do not find these claims valid before, and then consider how the competing analyses we cite fare with the binding facts we discussed.

6. Two ways to form a passive

Based on claims introduced first in Alexiadou & Doron (2012), Alexiadou et al. (2015) propose the following two structures for the passive of Greek and English respectively.

(56)

(57)

The Greek passive is formed via VoiceP_MIDDLE whereas in English it is formed via a VoiceP selected by Passive. The two Voice heads differ in the feature makeup, e.g. +/– agentive. The Voice_MIDDLE head of the Greek passive is argued to be only agentive (cf. Alexiadou et al. 2015: 120) whereas the Voice head of the English passive can be of different kinds, e.g. causative. Under this view, the by-phrases are merged as adjuncts to VoiceP and must match the features of this projection (cf. Alexiadou et al 2015: 35 and references therein). Thus, this work assumes on the basis of the pair in (19) that the passive by-phrases of Greek cannot be causers because of a feature mismatch with the agentive features of the VoiceP.

The assumption that the Voice head of the Greek passive is only agentive cannot be maintained since, as we showed in Section 3, causer PPs are in fact allowed. Furthermore, other kinds of non-agentive PPs, e.g. experiencer, goal or recipient, are also compatible with the Greek passive (see Section 3). The issue that arises in this case is that (all kinds of) non-agentive PPs are predicted to be blocked under this account, contrary to fact, because just like causer PPs, they are incompatible with the agentive features of VoiceP.¹⁴

Setting these issues aside, we discuss the assumptions this literature makes for the non-active morphology of the Greek passive. Concretely, following Embick (1998, 2004), Alexiadou et al. (2015) claim that the non-active morphology is the result of a post syntactic spell-out rule targeting Voice heads lacking a specifier:

Nonetheless, if agents are uniformly projected in the syntax in the active and the passive, as we showed in the previous sections, the rule in (58) does not correctly describe the distribution of non-active voice morphology in Greek. One way to capture the parallelism is to dissociate voice morphology and the external argument projection.¹⁵ Thus, if voice morphology is found in Voice (projecting a VoiceP), as in Rivero (1990), then the external argument should not be generated in Spec VoiceP, but in some other projection, e.g. in Spec vP, as in Chomsky (1995) (pace Kratzer 1996). Under this view, Voice plays a role in the syntax of the passive but has nothing to do with the projection of the external argument (cf. Collins 2005). Thus, based on the Greek data first, we come to the following conclusion:

Extensive previous literature has actually adopted (59) in various ways (cf. Manzini et al. 2006; Roberts 2019 and Newman 2020 i.a.). Moreover, based on VP-ellipsis facts, Merchant (2013: 98) shows that (59) must be correct and adds to this claim that “There is in fact no conceptual reason these two should go together, and the ellipsis facts argue directly against this assumption.” (for further arguments against external arguments being projected in [Spec,Voice], see Zyman & Kalivoda 2020: 8). Similarly, Ramchand (2017: 10) explicitly argues that the head introducing the external argument in her analysis is not the same thing as VoiceP.

Having shown some of the reasons for rejecting (58), we turn our attention to some restrictions that have been argued to arise from the structure in (56):

	Alexiadou et. al (2015: (1–4), 135)
i.	Some verbs that form anticausatives with active morphology are not allowed to combine with non-active morphology in order to form a passive, either for phonological or for semantic reasons.
ii.	Many mono-eventive verbs, i.e. verbs not expressing a change-of-state, resist passivization, subject to idiolectal variation.
iii.	Change-of-state verbs combining with expletive Voice in anticausatives are often not allowed to form passives.
iv.	Apo-phrases are characterized by what has been called “reduced agentivity,” i.e. they prefer to introduce non-specifics, plurals, and indefinites.

Alexiadou et. al. claim that these restrictions are “poorly understood” and add that “Sometimes it is not even clear which of the restrictions are semantic in nature and which ones are morpho-phonological.” It thus follows that what they present are in fact intuitions and assumptions, rather than a full analysis, of the possible ways in which the above restrictions could be linked to the proposed structures in (56–57).¹⁶ Precisely because these intuitions/ assumptions are not fleshed out it is not obvious how they can support the view that the Greek and English passives are formed in distinct ways. In what follows, we focus more closely on the distribution of Greek by-phrases, which is the central topic in the paper. To this effect, we examine restriction iv above, which claims that Greek by-phrases exhibit the effects of “reduced agentivity”, or that their distribution is severely restricted because of the fact that passive Voice in Greek is formed differently from English. We demonstrate that these claims are unsubstantiated, therefore, they do not support the idea that the Greek passive is special from the perspective of the English passive.

7. Binding Data in alternative theories of the passive

Consider a theory like that of Bruening 2013 (similar remarks hold for Legate 2014 and Alexiadou et al. 2015) with respect to the binding theory data reported in section 4. For Bruening (2013: 24), the by-phrase is an adjunct:

This conclusion is familiar from the Principles and Parameters literature which also analyzed the by-phrase of the passive as an adjunct. The novelty of Bruening’s analysis is that it is tied to an explicit treatment of the semantics of the preposition by (see Bruening 2013: 25, and see Legate 2014: 41 for a related proposal):

For example, the phrase by the lobbyist denotes a function which takes the denotation of a Voice-phrase as an argument (so by the lobbyist denotes a function of functions).

On Bruening’s theory the by-phrase is an adjunct, and the preposition by has a complex denotation. Like other adjuncts, the DP inside the PP adjunct should be incapable of binding an anaphor. Thus, the following grammatical sentence is predicted to be ungrammatical in the indicated structure, which is the one proposed by Bruening:

In this structure, [the children] does not c-command the reciprocal, and so by principle A of the binding theory, it should not be able to bind it. Furthermore, on Bruening’s theory it would not be possible for the by-phrase itself to act as an antecedent. First, the by-phrase is not in an A-position (it is an adjunct), and binding theory is limited to relations between A-positions. Second, the pronoun would have no source for phi-features under (53). This is so because this P is analyzed as a semantically contentful preposition (cf. 68a). Third, the by-phrase is a predicate in Bruening’s analysis and thus, is of the wrong semantic type to be the antecedent of a pronoun of type <e>.

8. Non-active morphology and deponent verbs

This section focuses on deponent verbs, responding to a reviewer’s comment. It shows that, despite numerous attempts, the syntactic behavior of these verbs speaks against the idea that non-active morphology in Greek is the spell-out of a Voice head lacking a specifier (cf. 58). We start with a basic description of the syntax of deponent verbs. These verbs have active syntax, namely, they take a nominative and an accusative argument; however, they are marked morphologically with non-active morphology, shown in (70).

The challenge deponent verbs pose for the theories according to which non-active morphology signals the presence of a Voice head lacking a specifier is clear: if the nominative DP argument above, which is interpreted and functions as an agent is merged in Spec VoiceP, the verb should appear in active morphology according to the spell-out rule in (58), contrary to fact.

In Alexiadou (2013; 2019), the nominative argument of deponent verbs is assumed to be an experiencer. In her analysis, experiencers are different from agents in that they are introduced in a root internal position, instead of Spec VoiceP. Given this, deponent verbs are allowed to combine with a Voice head, which, just as in the passive, lacks a specifier. This head gives rise to the non-active morphology that deponent verbs realize.

Alexiadou’s analysis is challenged by a number of facts. First, as an anonymous reviewer points out, there are deponent verbs as hirizome ‘handle’ or epititheme ‘attack’ whose external argument is undoubtedly an agent (cf. Zombolou & Alexiadou 2014) and, under standard assumptions, it must be introduced in Spec VoiceP on the theory put forward in Alexiadou et al. (2015). Moreover, citing data from Embick (1997), Grestenberger (2018) discusses that some deponent verbs behave clearly as agentive verbs, not as experiencer verbs with respect to a number of syntactic diagnostics, such as agent-noun formation, Clitic Doubling, word order, Clitic Left Dislocation and agent-oriented modification (see also Oikonomou 2014, which also finds the analysis of deponent verbs as experiencer verbs hard to maintain in some cases). In light of these findings, Grestenberger (2018) proposes an alternative analysis, according to which nominative arguments of deponents constitute true agent arguments, which, however, are merged non-canonically in a projection below VoiceP, that is, XP, as shown below:

(71)

In Grestenberger (2018), (71) arises as a result of a diachronic process by which a benefactive argument, hosted in Spec XP, is reanalyzed as an agent. The only reason for which Spec VoiceP cannot host the external argument either via base generation or via movement from Spec XP is that it does not accord with the assumption, adopted from Alexiadou et al. (2015) among others, that non-active morphology marks the absence of specifier in VoiceP, (58). Nonetheless, since this assumption has already been shown to be incorrect here and elsewhere, it cannot support (71), the ad hoc reanalysis process and Grestenberger’s analysis of deponents in the overall.¹⁹

9. Discussion

This section constitutes a short note on the Theta Criterion, responding to a reviewer who is wondering whether our findings have implications for it. Let us start by noting that the competing theories of the passive (cf. Bruening 2013) that we have discussed (and rejected) dismiss the effects of the Theta Criterion. These theories are based on Heim & Kratzer (1998: 51–53), where the Theta Criterion is replaced by the weaker principle of interpretability, a principle only requiring that the output of syntax be interpretable by the principles of semantic composition. Take for instance Bruening (2013), which notes:

Bruening (2013: 23)

“Because there are no syntactic thematic roles in this system, there is also no θ-Criterion. Elements will either combine semantically, or they will not. If a head is a function that calls for an argument and an argument of the appropriate type combines with it, the semantics will be well-formed. If a predicate calls for an argument and no argument combines with it, it will be ill-formed. If there is an argument that does not serve as the argument of any predicate in the semantics, the result will also be ill-formed. All the work of the θ -Criterion is done by the semantics.”

If it were the case that the Theta Criterion can be totally replaced by the weaker principle of interpretability, the derivation proposed in Bruening’s (2013), where passive by-phrases are merged as adjuncts, should in principle be possible because it yields an interpretable structure (cf. Section 7). Nonetheless, the binding facts from different languages, e.g. Greek, English and Czech,²⁰ show that the only structure that is attested is the one where the passive by-phrases are syntactically realized as the external argument (cf. 50). This can be reduced to Chomsky’s (1981, 1986) Theta Criterion whose effect is to force the syntactic projection of arguments. Alternatively, in the configurational approach to theta theory outlined in Hale & Kayser (1993) and Chomsky (1995: 312ff.; 2000: 103ff.), theta roles are understood to be associated with particular syntactic positions:

This entails that if a syntactic position, e.g. Spec vP, is not projected, an agent theta role cannot be assigned because the relevant configuration is not structurally available. Consequently, the configurational approach has the effect of ruling out the derivations proposed for by-phrases in Bruening (2013), Legate (2014) and Alexiadou et al. (2015).

10. Conclusion

In this paper, we have established that the by-phrase in Greek passives can bear the same variety of theta-roles as the external argument in the active (see Jaeggli 1986 and Collins 2005 for English). This finding supports a view according to which the Greek by-phrase is projected in the same manner as the external argument in the active. In fact, the by-phrase of Greek passives can also bind a reflexive. We have shown that this binding fact can be accounted for by externally merging the by-phrase in both English and Greek into Spec vP, which is the position of external arguments. From Spec vP, the by-phrase c-commands and binds non-exempt reflexive pronouns contained in the VP. As we have shown, the binding possibilities with adjunct PPs are completely different, therefore showing that by-phrases are not adjunct PPs (contrary to Bruening 2013, Legate 2014 and Alexiadou et. al. 2015).

Our results have a number of consequences for recent analyses of the Greek and English passive and beyond. First, our analysis argues against recent analyses of Bruening (2013), Legate (2014) and Alexiadou et al. (2015) which claim that the passive by-phrase is an adjunct. The data and discussion in this paper also argue against the hypothesis that external arguments are externally merged in Spec VoiceP (contra Kratzer 1996) or that non-active voice morphology in Greek is the spell-out of a Voice head lacking a specifier (pace Embick 1998). Furthermore, the paper discussed extensively why the claims that the Greek and English passive are formed differently are not supported by the actual distribution of Greek by-phrases. Lastly, the paper showed that the external argument position must always be projected in the passive. We proposed that this follows from principles such as Chomsky’s (1981, 1986) Theta Criterion.

Abbreviations

The following glosses are used in this paper: S = singular; PL = plural; 1 = First person; 2 = Second person; 3 = Third person; NOM = Nominative; ACC = Accusative; GEN = Genitive; DAT = Dative; PRES = present; CL = clitic; PTPL = participle. An example marked with ‘*’ means that the example is unacceptable for grammatical reasons.

Competing Interests

The authors have no competing interests to declare.