Abstract
Abstract This paper deals with (non-) blocking phenomena arising in the context of morphological voice marking patterns, such as active versus passive (as in e.g. Latin), or active versus non-active (as in e.g. Albanian and Modern Greek). Starting from the observation that across languages with voice (or voice-related) marking non-blocking effects arise only with unaccusatives (specifically, with so-called “alternating unaccusatives”), but not for instance with passives or reflexives, the paper presents a variety of facts that converge in showing that this situation is due to a difference in the respective featural make-up of passives and unaccusatives. The central claim that is defended is that the passive morphology is being reanalysed as a morpheme that relates not just to an [–external argument] feature, but to a [+activity] feature (in the sense of Kallulli 2007) in a predicate structure (here: v 0) also containing a [–external argument] feature.
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