Grammatical voice and tense-aspect in Slavic

In this paper, we analyse the prototypicality of the passive voice in the Slavic languages. We argue that there are some variations in the periphrastic passive, which stem from the historical development of the tense-aspect system, particularly from an earlier resultative construction in the case of Indo-European languages. The periphrastic construction in some languages has abandoned the earlier tense-aspectual features, while in other languages they are still preserved. The periphrastic construction in every branch of Slavic has been considered passive in previous works. However, we claim that it is a case of the passive in East and some of West Slavic, while that in South Slavic is better considered as a resultative. This diversity motivates the continuum of tense-aspect and passive in Slavic

Published online: 20 September 2006
https://doi.org/10.1075/tsl.68.12toy