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Notice that, in passive sentences, the features of X are satisfied by movement of
VP to spec XP rather than movement of V to X. I argued for a similar analysis for
gapping sentences in section 4.2.2.
The second Marshallese passive structure is one in which there is a null voice
head and an ippān phrase, as in (454a) repeated here, or jān phrase. In the discussion that
follows, I assume that jān and ippān are the same sort of prepositions. Therefore I will
only discuss sentences with ippān, with the stipulation that anything I say regarding
ippān generalizes to jān.
(454) a. Amimōno ko r-ar āj ippā-n kōrā eo.
handicraft the.pl.nh 3pl.agr-T(past) weave.intrans with-3s woman the.s
'The handicrafts were woven by the woman.'
For sentences like (454a), I turn to an idea considered by Collins for Japanese and
Mahajan (1994) for Hindi. This idea is that the logical subject is still merged in the spec
vP position in passives, but that it is merged as part of a prepositional phrase. In
Marshallese, this means that the agent phrase in (454a) – ippān kōrā eo – is merged in
spec vP, as illustrated by (515).
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