Turkish: A Comprehensive Grammar

Turkish: A comprehensive grammar 136
13.2.2.3 Impersonal passives
The addition of a passive suffix to an intransitive verb produces an impersonal passive
construction:
(47) Adalara artık deniz otobüsüyle mi gid-il-ecek?
go-PASS-FUT
‘Will hovercraft be the way that [people] go to the islands now?’
In such constructions there is no particular person or group of persons that is understood
as performing the action denoted by the verb, hence such sentences cannot have agent
phrases. The closest English equivalents are active sentences with ‘people’, ‘one’ or the
impersonal ‘you’ as subject.
Impersonal passives occur most often with aorist marking, to express a general
property of a particular entity (see 21.4.1.1). (48) below indicates a property of
cobblestone streets:
(48) Arnavut kaldırım-ı üst-ün-de topuklu pabuç-la yürü-n-mez.
cobblestone.street-NC top-3SG.POSS-LOC high.heeled shoe-COM walk-PASS-
NEG.AOR
‘[You] can’t walk on cobblestone streets wearing high-heeled shoes.’
In impersonal passive constructions the action denoted by the verb is understood to be
attributed to human beings; hence sentences such as the following cannot refer to actions
by inanimate entities.
(49) Parmaklık o kadar alçak ki balkondan aşağı düş-ül-ebi-ir.
fall-PASS-PSB-AOR
‘The railing is so low that [one] could fall off the balcony.’
13.2.2.4 Double passive constructions
When a transitive verb combines with two passive suffixes, the result is again an
impersonal passive which refers to a property of a particular entity. These constructions
are quite marginal, and are almost always used with the aorist suffix. In double passive
constructions the first occurrence of the passive suffix has an intransitivizing function.
(50) Böyle laf-a kır-ıl-ın-ır.
such word-DAT hurt-PASS-PASS-AOR
‘[One] can be hurt by such words.’
(51) Bu duruma tabii ki üz-ül-ün-ebil-ir.
sadden-PASS-PASS-PSB-AOR
‘[One] can of course be upset by this situation.’
In colloquial Turkish some speakers tend to use a second passive suffix after the suffix -
(y)Abil as in yap-ıl-abil-in-ir ‘[it] can be done’. This duplication does not serve any
syntactic function.
For the obligatory occurrence of passive morphology in the main clause of a sentence
whose subject is a -mAK noun clause that is itself passive, see 24.4.1.4.