Chapter 3 On Deontic Passives
In: Passives Cross-LinguisticallySearch for other papers by Eva-Maria Remberger in
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Abstract
In addition to the canonical passive involving an auxiliary verb + past participle, there are several types of deontic passives in Romance, in which instead of the neutral auxiliary we find a movement or modal verb + past participle. These periphrases exhibit all the ingredients of a true passive: they involve a transitive verb in a participial form that agrees with the internal (thematic) argument, which can raise into a preverbal subject position; there is a passive auxiliary agreeing with the internal argument while the suppressed (external) agent argument can be reactivated by a by-phrase; moreover, the additional modal meaning of the auxiliary gives the construction a deontic interpretation.
In Romanian, a particular deontic passive is found, with the (impersonal) verb for Must (borrowed from Slavonic), trebuie făcut, literally, ‘it must done’. Trebuie appears in many constructions in Romanian diachrony and synchrony, and there are types of trebuie făcut where the participle (sometimes analysed as a supine) oscillates between a passive and an impersonal active interpretation (the latter when used with an unaccusative or unergative verb). The trebuie + participle construction is therefore a good illustration of the transition of impersonals to passives.