Whether you say in English ‘the policeman caught the thief’ or ‘the thief was caught by the policeman’, you convey the same message. However, the way you pack this message differs with regard to the importance given to the active participant. In the first sentence, the policeman is the clause subject and he plays an active role in the process denoted by the event. In the second sentence, the thief, who undergoes the action, is raised to the subject position, whilst the policeman is demoted to an oblique noun phrase, introduced by the preposition ‘by’. The passage from the first sentence to the second corresponds to the phenomenon of passivization.
Many languages of the world have passive constructions. Passivization could thus appear as a wellstudied syntactic operation. But if a large number of descriptions have dealt with the way passive constructions are expressed, a range of properties concerning the demoted and the promoted constituents is still not adequately understood, especially in under-described languages.
The proposed project aims to conduct a cross-linguistic survey of passive constructions in a large and representative sample of Bantu languages, in order to develop a typology of passives in this language family and representative sample of Bantu languages, in order to develop a typology of passives in this language family. Comparison is assessed on the basis of a series of parameters meant to cover all morphological and syntactic aspects of passive constructions. It is expected that the variation obtained will lead to the emergence of regional and genetic patterns.