Chapter 11 Synthetic Passives in Early and Impaired Grammar: The View from Greek Reflexive Verbs
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Abstract
Passive sentences are known to be acquired late by children and to pose problems for agrammatics crosslinguistically. In this paper I present data from Greek-speaking individuals that belong to these two groups, but do not follow the expected pattern. Children were found to fall seriously behind on the passives of run-of-the-mill transitive verbs but do exceptionally well on the passives of reflexive verbs, while the passives of both types of verbs were relatively spared for agrammatics.
I consider this behavior to be primarily the consequence of language-specific properties of passives. Greek passives are synthetic, and are formed via inflectional morphology of the verb. The same morphology is shared by reflexives, as well as middles, and unaccusatives. I propose that what renders children’s passives of transitive verbs difficult is that their syntactic subject has a theme theta role. Reflexive verbs have such subjects as part of their argument structure, so no difficulty arises for children when they are faced with the passives of these verbs. Reflexive verbs are not reported to pose problems for agrammatic aphasics crosslinguistically. I hold that the morphology they share with passives in Greek renders the theme subject of the latter a familiar configuration, this is why no particular difficulties arise for the passives of Greek-speaking agrammatics.