A Minimalist Review of Current Theories on Japanese Passivisation

The Japanese passive voice has presented challenges to a universal theory of passivisation as a process where an internal argument, usually the direct object, is promoted to the subject position. A subset of Japanese passives called “indirect” passives appear to increase the valence of their predicate, containing an additional argument, occupying the subject position, when compared to corresponding active sentences. This has led to some controversy in research assuming specific structures for such sentences, with some researchers arguing that the passive morpheme in indirect passives is merely homophonous with a counterpart in more traditional passives, while some argue that Japanese has no true passive voice. Recently, some arguments have been made that the subjects of these indirect passives in fact do have active sources which are obscured by general facts of movement in Japanese, i.e. that post-nominal elements are never left stranded.

This text is intended as a critical review of prior research on the Japanese passive under current Minimalist understandings of syntactic theory. To that end, three prominent schools of thought on Japanese passive formation are examined: Non-uniform analyses, which posit two homophonous passive morphemes used in different constructions; Uniform analyses, which claim that Japanese has no true indigenous passive voice; and the recent unified passive analysis put forth by Ishizuka (2012), which posits that instances of increased valence in certain passives are in fact derived in a similar manner to English pseudo-passives, where a non-core argument is promoted to the subject position. These theories will be compared in how well they comply with given data, as well as their tenability under syntactic assumptions made in current Minimalist Program-based theory.