A Derivational Account for Sorani Kurdish Passives

In this paper we propose a new analysis for Sorani Kurdish passive formation. We argue that passivisation in Sorani Kurdish actually is a derivational process and propose four arguments supporting this claim. Within lexicalist approaches to morphosyntax, the question whether to treat passivisation as an inflectional or a derivational process has often been raised. The traditional treatment of passive considers it to be an inflectional process. This traditional view is followed by certain number of recent studies (Stump, 2006; Hippisley, 2007) that presuppose the existence of one single paradigm for both the active and the passive verb forms of a given lexeme. On the other hand, (Sadler and Spencer, 1998) claim a derivational analysis of passives while (Bresnan, 1982) states that passives may serve as an input for derivational processes. If one accepts that inflected forms cannot function as an input for derivational processes, (Bresnan, 1982) inevitably entails a derivational treatment of passivisation. (Blevins, 2003) proposes a treatment for passives as a morphological process called Passive Lexical Rule (PLR) applicable to a whole series of languages. (Sag et al., 2003) argue that the argument-structure-changing operation triggered by passivisation are evidence for a derivational analysis for passives. Others, like (Kiparsky, 2005) do not explicitly choose between the two approaches. Yet the data Kiparsky presents for Latin rather favours a derivational analysis. Usually, derivation is said to operate semantic change in an unpredictable way: as opposed to inflectional processes, given one derivational process, there is not necessarily one unique predictable semantic change that systematically occurs. Based on data from Latin, (Kiparsky, 2005) shows that morphological passive forms may have several distinct values, not only syntactic passive value. These values are lexically specified, i.e. not directly predictable.