6. Passive in Armenian

This chapter provides an overview of the passive in Armenian, focusing on the typological characteristics and diachronic developments in passive voice marking. It examines the evolution of passive voice from Classical Armenian, which lacked consistent passive marking, to Middle Armenian, where the agglutinative morpheme -v- emerged as a transparent marker for passive voice besides reflexive, reciprocal, and anticausative meanings. The chapter studies the morphological and syntactic changes across different periods of Armenian, including the role of stem alternations, participles, and minor strategies in expressing passive meaning, such as complex predicates (also known as light verb constructions). The chapter also sheds light on the influence of language contact besides the mostly internal motivations that shaped the modern Armenian voice system.