Indirect Passives in English and Greek

The indirect passive construction (e.g. I was given a book) is ungrammatical
in many languages; however, it is found in both English and
Ancient Greek. Much previous work on indirect passives seeks to explain
their origin in terms of language-specific developments, and thus has difficulty
accounting for the substantial parallels between indirect passives in
languages as different typologically as English and Ancient Greek. Using
corpus data, we show that in both English and Ancient Greek the acceptability
of indirect passives varies widely across different lexemes, a variation
that can be predicted only in part by the thematic roles of the arguments in
question. The data also show that in both languages, indirect passives occur
earliest and most productively in verbs with multiple, potentially ambiguous
argument structures; we propose that indirect passives in English and
Ancient Greek may have originated in the reanalysis of what were originally
direct (i.e. theme-subject) passives. Despite these similarities, indirect passives
in English and Greek ultimately followed different diachronic paths,
becoming increasingly productive in English but being lost in Greek; some
of the factors potentially responsible for this divergence are also examined.