Passives and near-passives in Balto-Slavic

This paper claims that variation regarding the appearance of accusative case on the Theme argument of passive and passive-like predicates in Ukrainian, Polish, and Lithuanian is a function of the arrangement of a predicate’s voice property and transitivity property in the functional domain of vP. Accusative survives passivization (and related constructions) only when v-voice, which is concerned with the projection of an external argument, and v-cause, which identifies a causative sub-event and serves as an accusative probe, appear “unbundled” in the sense of Pylkkänen’s (2008) Voice Bundling Parameter, thereby linking structural accusative to the structure of the event. In such “split-vP” languages, accusative appears regardless of the specification of voice as active or passive.