Passive in Sŏranī and Kurmanji Kurdish based on Role and Reference Grammar

The purpose of this study is to examine the passive in Sŏranī and Kurmanji Kurdish based on Role and Reference Grammar. The strategy of the research is analytic-comparative. Sŏranī and Kurmanji, respectively, manifest morphological and periphrastic passive voice. In Sŏranī (Mahǎbǎdi) passive is marked by suffix rǎ/rě attached to a verb and in Kurmanji by the auxiliary verb hǎtin "to come" along with infinitive. In this study, it is shown that despite the past transitive constructions in Kurmanji and Sŏranī, respectively, display ergative morphology and non-accusative (neither ergative nor accusative), the passive is insensitive to the tense, namely, passive in the past and present tenses follows the same pattern of accusative languages and it shows that passive construction canonically involve two phenomena of the universal formulation of basic voice oppositions in Van Valin (2007): privileged syntactic argument (PSA) modulation and argument modulation. Furthermore, this study shows that the Role and Reference Grammar approach cannot make a clear account about those non-active structures that form from intransitive complex verbs.