Passive Voice in Kurmanji Kurdish

Voice refers to morphosyntactic processes that verbs link core arguments to semantic roles. To be less technical, it is the semantic relations between a verb and core arguments (S, A and O). A is subject of a transitive sentence. S is subject of an intransitive sentence. O (sometimes called Patient) is object of a transitive sentence). There are three voices: Active, passive and middle. So let’s briefly talk about what these voices are.

We will start with probably the most used, uninteresting (for me) and least difficult one: active voice.

(1)   Ez       te                 di-bîn-im
         1s      2s:OBL    IND-see:PRES-1s

                         ‘I see you’

The reason the sentence above is in active voice is subject of the verb (Ez) is the one performing the action while the object (Te) is the one being performed on. So, bi kûrt û Kurmancî ¹ (to sum up), if A of a sentence is the one who acts on something, we call those “active voice”.

As you might have already guessed from the first word of the pair, middle voice stands between active and passive voice. Middle voice is used when we don’t know who the actual agent of a sentence is. I have always been a believer in the notion that you learn best by examples. So here are two examples from English:

(2)      Her novels sell well.
            The window opens well.

The sentences above are neither passive nor active. They are not passive because the verbs are not accompanied by verb to be and they are not in participle form. They are not active because we know that novels don’t sell themselves (so how come a novel becomes a bestseller?).
Here is another example of middle voice from Russian:

(3)    active:     Ivan bril Pyotra.
                              Ivan was shaving Peter.
         middle:    Ivan brilsya.
                            Ivan was getting shaved (either by himself or by someone else)

One cannot help but think about the famous paradox called Barber paradox: “The barber is the one who shaves all those, and those only, who don’t shave themselves. The question is, does the barber shave himself?” I don’t think any of these voices can help us untangle this paradox. So, let’s move on to the next one.

First, let’s give a basic definition of passive voice. If O of a transitive sentence is advanced to S of the sentence and the verb becomes a derived intransitive, the sentence is deemed passive. For example:

(4)    Tu       têyî                                             dît-in
          2s      IND-come:PRES(2s)      see-INF
                            ‘you are seen’

However, it is not always so easy to detect passive voice because passive and ergative constructions (especially syntactically ergative languages like Dyirbal) are sometimes hard to distinguish. Comrie (1988) proposed four parameters for identifying passives as opposed to ergatives. According to Comrie, the prototypically passive should have these parameters:

1. Argument structure of the verb form: A passive verb form licenses a single core argument, a Patient (O) or Theme.
2. Syntactic status of Patient/Theme: The single core argument is a full subject, i.e. possesses all of the subject properties generally associated with the subject of an active intransitive verb in the language.
3. Systemic status of the verb form: Within the paradigmatic system of verb forms available in the language, a passive verb form is the marked member of a voice opposition, contrasting with the unmarked active and derivable from it via a productive morphosyntactic process.
4. Syntactic status of Agent-phrase: The Agent-phrase is optional; the construction is fully grammatical without it. If present, it has peripheral syntactic status, i.e. Few if any syntactic rules make reference to it.

Let’s analyse a sentence from a Nom-Acc language.
(5)   active:     Comrie wrote the book in 1988.
         passive:  The book was written (by Comrie) in 1988.

The sentence above shows all four features of the prototypical passive: 1- The active voice form of the sentence has two core arguments; Comrie and the book (A and O or Patient). However, the passive voice has one core argument; The book. So the passivization process decreased the number of core arguments. 2- the single core argument is a full subject of an active intransitive verb of the sentence; the subject, the book, is in agreement in number with the predicate. It would be “the books were written” if the subject were plural. 3- the form was built is generally accepted to be the marked form of an active/passive opposition. There are three reasons for that: (i) an additional morpheme is used (was); (ii) in terms of text frequency; and (iii) in terms of productivity: all verbs have an active form, but not all have a corresponding passive (e.g. So-called unaccusative verbs such as fall, die, flow etc.)²

For an analysis of a sentence from a syntactically ergative language please refer to Dixon (1977) or Haig (2004:29). The result of the analysis is this: it is not so clear whether transitive verb sentences in Dyirbal is ergative or passive. Most linguists, including Dixon, have opted for an ergative analysis. Dixon (1977) himself comes to the conclusion that unmarked ergative construction is close to the marked passive constructions of other languages.

Construction of passive voice in Kurmanji is quite straightforward. You take the O of a transitive sentence, move it to S position, and then add the verb “hatin” (of course it needs to be conjugated) followed by infinitive (Dorleijn (1996) says that there is no infinitive stem of a Kurdish verb, but rather present or past stem form of the verb).

Let’s give a passive voice example from Kurmanji Kurdish:

Past tense verb forms are passivized by exactly the same processes. The different morphology of A and O in the past tense is irrelevant for the application of the passive: