ABSTRACT
The passive (Dinner was served by the father) has been studied extensively from formal perspectives, mainly because of its complexity, which makes it cognitively more costly. Unlike active sentences (The father served dinner) in which theta-role mappings align with syntactic structure, passives undergo a movement transformation that reorganizes theta-role mappings, such that the Patient/Theme is mapped to the structural subject, and the Agent is demoted to a prepositional phrase. For second language (L2) acquisition of the passive to occur, L2 learners must figure out the specific pragmatic, semantic and syntactic constraints that regulate passives. Research examining L2 acquisition of the passive has been conducted under different approaches including pragmatic, psycholinguistic, and L2 instruction. This chapter presents a critical review of this research with special focus on what has been studied about the passive morphosyntax and semantics.
