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In the literature, Marshallese verbs are often categorized as perfective or as passive. However, sentences containing perfectives and passives share numerous morphological, syntactic, and semantic similarities. As a result, it is difficult to tell whether these sentences are perfective or passive. In this paper, I examine perfective and passive verbs and sentences and provide semantic and syntactic evidence supporting the existence of two verb categories. First, I show that while passive verbs denote events, so-called perfective verbs denote the resulting state of events and are thus resultatives rather than perfectives. Second, I show that passive verbs are syntactically different from resultatives in that they may cooccur with an agent phrase preceded by in. Lastly, I make a case for the existence of a passive construction in Marshallese and argue that in is the head of a Voice projection.
1.INTRODUCTION.1 In Marshallese, there ate a number ofveibs that ate traditionally translated into English as passive verbs. In the literature, some of these verbs are classified as passive (1), while others are classified as perfective (2) (see Bender 1969; Abo et al. 1976; Zewen 1977; Pagotto 1992; and Hale 1998, 2001).2
(1) Jawan ye=nahaj mij~mij rahyinyin.
John e=naaj mwij~mwij rainin.
John 3SG.AGR=FUT operate~INTR today
'John will be operated on today.' (Bender 1969:111)
(2)E=ar po bao eo.
3SG.AGR=PST be.caught chicken the.SG
'The chicken was caught.'
The translation of these sentences into English as passives seems to imply that both include passive verbs. However, if what has been written in the literature is correct, (1) is a passive sentence, while (2) is an unaccusative sentence containing a perfective verb. The situation is complicated by the fact that the literature does not provide the linguistic criteria used in the classification of these verbs and the sentences containing them. In other words, the linguistic evidence for classifying a verb as perfective or passive is absent.
This paper examines verbs that are traditionally classified as perfective or as passive to determine whether there is sufficient linguistic evidence to conclude that Marshallese has both an unaccusative construction containing a perfective verb and a passive construction containing a passive verb. I will show that sentences containing perfective verbs and those containing passive verbs behave differently semantically and syntactically, and should, therefore, not be...