Bornean passives in comparative perspective

Abstract This paper investigates three types of passives in Lebo’ Vo’, an endangered Kenyah language of northern Borneo (Austronesian), and discusses their implications for linguistic theory and syntactic typology. Passives in Lebo’ Vo’ involve a preverbal analytic marker, with an agent expressed optionally in immediately preverbal or postverbal position. Echoing differences between passives with and without agents in Mandarin Chinese ( Huang 1999 , a.o.), these different passive types differ in their ability to form long-distance passives. We argue that these three passive types differ in terms of their probing and nominal (Case) licensing specifications.