Copyright

Katherine Hodgson

Published On

2026-01-07

Page Range

pp. 277–316

Language

  • English

Print Length

40 pages

6. Passive in Armenian

Chapter of: Passivisation in Semitic, Iranian, Armenian, and Beyond (pp. 277–316)

This chapter provides an overview of the passive in Armenian, focusing on the typological characteristics and diachronic developments in passive voice marking. It examines the evolution of passive voice from Classical Armenian, which lacked consistent passive marking, to Middle Armenian, where the agglutinative morpheme -v- emerged as a transparent marker for passive voice besides reflexive, reciprocal, and anticausative meanings. The chapter studies the morphological and syntactic changes across different periods of Armenian, including the role of stem alternations, participles, and minor strategies in expressing passive meaning, such as complex predicates (also known as light verb constructions). The chapter also sheds light on the influence of language contact besides the mostly internal motivations that shaped the modern Armenian voice system.

Contributors

Katherine Hodgson

(author)
Research Associate in Linguistics at University of Cambridge
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1767-9262

(PhD, Inalco Paris, 2019) is a Research Associate in Linguistics at the University of Cambridge. She is currently working on the ERC-funded project Echoes of Vanishing Voices in the Mountains: A Linguistic History of Minorities in the Middle East, led by Geoffrey Khan. She has carried out an ELDP-funded project documenting Zok, an endangered variety of Armenian, as well as extensive fieldwork on other dialects of Armenian and Greek, including Pontic Greek as spoken in Armenia. Her research interests include syntax, information structure, linguistic typology, historical linguistics, dialectology, and language documentation, particularly in connection with Armenian and Greek.