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(468) *Emmaan eo e-ar bwil in kijeek eo.
man the.s 3s.agr-T(past) burn of fire the.s
'The man was burned by the fire.'
If this preposition introduced a causer rather than an agent, we might expect that it could
take inanimate complements. Since it can't, I conclude that in introduces an agent DP.
sentences:
So far, we've discussed the following five characteristics of Marshallese passive
1. There is no overt passive morphology.
2. Subjects may be non-initial.
3. Agreement occurs between AgrS and a third plural subject when the subject is
sentence initial.
4. Agent phrases are possible with ippān 'with', jān 'from' and in 'of'.
5. Subjects may be immediately postverbal when not followed by an in agent phrase.
This section has also discussed the semantics of the prepositions found in agent phrases,
showing that jān may introduce a causer, while ippān and in introduce agents. As a final
point in my discussion of the passive construction, I will discuss the semantic and
morphological factors that affect whether a verb may be passivized.
5.3.4 Verbs that may not be passivized
Passivization is not a completely productive syntactic process in Marshallese, and there
are a number of verbs that may not be passivized. Whether or not a verb can be
passivized is determined by two factors, one morphological and the other semantic.
In order for a verb to be passivized, it must have both an intransitive and a
transitive form. Thus verbs like etal 'go' and jillok 'bend over' cannot be passivized
because they do not have a transitive form.
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