Passive, Stative, and Impersonal in Ugaritic: The G-stem Internal Passive Reconsidered

Abstract

In this paper, I analysed around 57 relatively clear cases of the Gpass forms through a painstaking examination of their formal and functional characteristics. The collected data point at the following characteristics of Gpass usage in Ugaritic: the Ugaritic Gpass sentences do not allow agent-phrases; the Agent is demoted from the position of the subject without any syntactic traces. In semantic view, passive sentences regularly imply a concrete Agent or the information about a definite and referential Agent is recoverable from the close context, in contrast to the active impersonal usage. The promoted Patient/Theme is commonly fronted and topicalised in passive sentences. Most Gpass usages are promotional, derived from transitive verbs. I identified approximately eight cases of the impersonal passive. The language of poetry and the language of prose demonstrate a very proportional distribution of the Gpass forms. It is claimed in this paper that Gpass forms are not derived from G stative verbs, at least not on a regular basis, and are not used in middle voice functions. The contrast between the Gpass-stem and the N-stem has syntactic and semantic marking, and has diachronic implications.