Double Passivization in Turkish: A Structure Removal Approach

This paper deals with 'double passivization' in Turkish, an impersonal passive construction with two occurrences of passive morphology and two instances of argument reduction. The aim will be to adequately capture the fact that each instance of passivization seems to be mirrored by a morphological reflex on the verb. I will adopt the theory of passivization in Müller (2014, 2015a,b), who assumes that passivization involves merging and subsequently removing the external argument from the structure. The analysis of double passivization assumes two Voice projections above vP, each headed by a passive suffix. This approach will allow us to capture the relevant data for Turkish and it will also be shown how this approach extends to another case of double passivization in Lithuanian as well as antipassive constructions.