This article examines various aspects of the reconstruction of the passive in Proto-Indo-European (PIE), foremost on the basis of evidence from the Indo-Aryan (Early Vedic) and Greek branches. The onset stage of this development, in particular, capitalizes on the possibility nominalized VPs offer to manipulate the argument structure of the verb by keeping the initiator of the event off the stage. Even in this unfavourable situa-tion, however, a tentative scenario of how nominalized VPs might evolve into voice constructions may be sketched, in order to do justice to the few cases in which such a development appears to have taken place. In many of the other cases in which a nominalized VP has been hypothesized to be the source of a given voice construction there is no conclusive evidence for reconstruct-ing such a source, and in some cases even an alternative source can be posited. Such a review reveals that there are overall a few instances of passive/impersonal construc-tions that are likely to derive from nominalized VPs. The aim of this article is to review the available evidence concerning passive and impersonal constructions derived from nominalized VPs, with a view to establishing whether they are cross-linguistically recurrent, and robust as a type.
Nominalized verb phrases have been identified as a possible source of passive and impersonal constructions by Langacker & Munro (1975), Langacker (1976), and Givón (1981), with exemplification drawn almost exclusively from Uto-Aztecan languages, but have received relatively less attention than other sources (reflexive markers, generalized subject constructions, 3rd person plural constructions, inactive auxiliaries + passive participles, etc.).
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