Passivisation in Semitic, Iranian, Armenian, and Beyond - cover image

Book Series

Copyright

Paul Noorlander; Hiwa Asadpour. Copyright of individual chapters are maintained by the chapter author(s).

Published On

2026-01-07

ISBN

Paperback978-1-80511-826-8
Hardback978-1-80511-827-5
PDF978-1-80511-828-2

Language

  • English

Print Length

385 pages (x+375)

Dimensions

Paperback156 x 27 x 234 mm(6.14" x 1.05" x 9.21")
Hardback156 x 30 x 234 mm(6.14" x 1.18" x 9.21")

Weight

Paperback46g (1.61oz)
Hardback57g (2.00oz)

THEMA

  • CF
  • CFK
  • CFF
  • CFB
  • 1FB

BISAC

  • LAN009000
  • LAN009060
  • LAN009010
  • LAN009050

Keywords

  • Passive constructions
  • Detransitivisation
  • Agent demotion
  • Patient promotion
  • Diachronic development
  • Language contact

Passivisation in Semitic, Iranian, Armenian, and Beyond

This volume brings together research on passive voice constructions in low-resource languages of Western Asia, a region marked by extraordinary linguistic diversity as well as a long history of cultural suppression and marginalisation. The contributions showcase the passive voice in Semitic, Iranian, Armenian, Greek, and Turkic languages, many of which are endangered, understudied, or confined to diaspora communities and disappearing language islands. Education and cultural expression in these languages remained heavily restricted across parts of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran, underscoring the urgent need for documentation and revitalisation.

The chapters explore the rich typological variation of passive voice constructions, examining their typological traits, synchronic microvariation and diachronic developments. Drawing on Siewierska’s definition, the studies investigate processes of agent demotion and patient promotion, reductions in transitivity, and the fuzzy boundaries between passive and other detransitivisation strategies such as middles, anticausatives, statives and light verbs as well as impersonal subjects and agent omission. They also shed light on the impact of text genre, verbal aspect, and language contact on passivisation.

By integrating theoretical, typological, historical, and areal perspectives, the volume discusses the internal stability of detransitivisation strategies, their evolution from earlier source constructions, and their position in voice systems more broadly. It raises fundamental questions about whether cross-linguistic tendencies in passives reflect universal patterns or area-specific historical contingencies.

This collection thus provides an essential resource for scholars of all theoretical persuasions that are interested in voice and valency and/or in Western Asia’s linguistic diversity, while foregrounding the pressing need to support communities whose linguistic heritage is at risk.

Contents

Introduction

(pp. 1–24)
  • Paul M. Noorlander
  • Hiwa Asadpour

1. Passivisation in Semitic: Case Studies from Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic

(pp. 25–108)
  • Paul M. Noorlander

2. Passive Voice in Ṭuroyo

(pp. 109–148)
  • Nikita Kuzin

3. Passivisation in Northeastern Neo-Aramaic

(pp. 149–198)
  • Paul M. Noorlander

4. A Contact-Induced Structural Change with a Lexcial-Functional Asymmetry: A Passive Construction in Nayini

(pp. 199–232)
  • Roohollah Mofidi
  • Hiwa Asadpour

5. Passive Constructions in Garrusi Kurdish

(pp. 233–276)
  • Hiwa Asadpour
  • Masoume Zarei

6. Passive in Armenian

(pp. 277–316)
  • Katherine Hodgson

7. Passives in Asia Minor Greek

(pp. 317–334)
  • Nicolaos Neocleous

8. Passive Formation in Turkic: Diachronic Developments and Synchronic Patterns with a Focus on Azeri

(pp. 335–358)
  • Murad Suleymanov

Contributors

Paul M. Noorlander

(editor)
Research Associate in Hebrew and Aramaic Studies at University of Cambridge
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9407-1453

(PhD, Leiden University, 2018) is a Research Associate in Hebrew and Aramaic Studies at the University of Cambridge and Lecturer in Hebrew and Aramaic at Leiden University. He has published widely on Semitic languages, both ancient and modern. His main research concerns the typology of endangered Neo-Aramaic dialects from an areal-diachronic perspective. He is a laureate of a Rubicon Fellowship awarded by the Dutch Research Council and is the author of Ergativity and Other Alignment Types in Neo-Aramaic: Investigating Morphosyntactic Microvariation (Leiden: Brill, 2021).

Hiwa Asadpour

(editor)
Research Fellow at the Johanna Quandt Young Academy at Goethe University Frankfurt
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7074-2435

(PhD, Goethe University Frankfurt, 2021) is a Research Fellow at the Johanna Quandt Young Academy at the Goethe University Frankfurt (JQYA), where he explores interdisciplinary applications of his linguistic research. He specialises in comparative and corpus-based linguistic analysis of Iranian and non-Iranian languages, with a focus on morphosyntax. His current research examines language production mechanisms in Kurdish varieties, Persian, Armenian, Neo-Aramaic, and Azeri-Turkic, integrating natural language corpus data (both fieldwork and published sources) with experimental results. He is actively involved in the development of treebanks for several Kurdish varieties within the Universal Dependencies framework, and is supervising the development of treebanks for other low-resource Iranian languages at Saarland University.