Passive in Jamaican Creole

Because Jamaican Creole lacks the familiar morphological indicators of the passive that characterize English, its lexifier language, it has sometimes been assumed that Jamaican either lacks a passive, or that its passive is fundamentally different from that of English. However, a Government and Binding analysis explicitly shows that Jamaican Creole has a passive and that it is formed, syntactically, in the same way as morphologically signaled passives, including that of English. The conclusion is that there is, indeed, a passive morpheme in Jamaican Creole which, though devoid of phonetic content, behaves the same as the overt passive morphemes of other languages.