Abstract
Since Grimshaw (1992) discussed their close relationship between the passive construction and the external argument seriously, the perspective of the relevant researches has radically changed from the classical Case theory based analysis to the subject oriented Theta theoretical analysis. The approach from this direction can deal with both the unexpected passives of some intransitive verbs and the ungrammatical passives of some transitive verbs more easily than one from the other direction. Wanner (2009) particularly argues that an external argument in passives is suppressed so that it is not realized at syntax but it is there as an implicit argument and interpreted as such. In this paper, two-place verbs with no passive versions are focused and claimed to have two internal arguments. It was shown that the Theta System in Reinhart (2016) provides not only a systematic analysis for mapping of theta roles and their syntactic positions but also can be extended to explain the exceptional cases of transitive verbs with no passives.
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