Abstract

ABSTRACT The article challenges the traditional theory according to which only transitive verbs can have passive voice forms in Russian. Based on the Russian National Corpus and texts found on the Internet, the paper shows that the grammatical system of Russian permits the passivization of oblique-complement verbs and verbs that govern prepositional phrases. The analysis shows that whether or not a verb permits the formation of passive voice forms depends on the communicative status of the complement rather than its grammatical form, while the semantic and morphonological restrictions on passivization equally apply to verbs regardless of the form of their complements. The paper gives evidence confirming that some passive voice forms are loan translations from other languages, but argues that the use of the loan translation mechanism does not bring about anything that contradicts the rules of Russian grammar, but rather leads to a more comprehensive implementation of previously unused capabilities of the grammatical system.

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