Adjectival passives and adjectival decausatives in Hebrew

Abstract

The distinction between adjectival passives and verbal passives is a very well known one. In this paper, I try to define the operation that forms adjectival passives in Hebrew. I claim that a close look at Hebrew adjectival passives reveals that they do not form a homogenous group, but rather two groups, which behave differently with regard to their interpretation. Adjectives of the first group behave like verbal passives in that they have an implicit Agent in their interpretation; adjectives of the second group behave like unaccusative verbs, in that the external argument of the transitive verb is no longer a part of their semantics. Based on this parallelism, I label the first type of adjectives ('true') adjectival passives and the second 'adjectival decausatives. Having established that there are two types of adjectival passives, I claim that they are derived by the same operations which derive the corresponding verb types. Therefore, no additional operations need to be stipulated in order to account for adjectival passive formation