Actes du congrès annuel de l’Association canadienne de linguistique 2008. Proceedings of the 2008 annual conference of the Canadian Linguistic Association. © 2008 Heather Bliss and Dennis Ryan Storoshenko PASSIVIZATION AND A’-MOVEMENT IN SHONA * Heather Bliss 1 and Dennis Ryan Storoshenko 2 University of British Columbia 1 and Simon Fraser University 2 1. Introduction Passivization is typically viewed as a two-pronged process. In a passive construction, the canonical direct object is elevated to the subject position of a sentence, and additionally, the canonical subject is either deleted or demoted to an oblique position. In Shona (Narrow Bantu), the passive is much more versatile, in that not only canonical direct objects, but other internal arguments, as well as adjuncts, can appear as the subject of a passive sentence. In this paper, we propose that the Shona passive is a backgrounding operation acting solely to demote the agent of a sentence (Foley and Van Valin 1985), rather than to promote or foreground an internal argument. We treat the movement of objects (and adjuncts) to the subject position as an independent phenomenon, merely made visible in the passive environment. Under our analysis, all subjects in Shona occupy an A’ topic position. In an active sentence, the agent at Spec, TP moves string-vacuously into the specifier of a topic position in the left clause periphery, Spec, Top(ic)P. In a passive, on the other hand, the agent is not an eligible topic, and as a result, a vP-internal DP topicalizes to the left edge of the clause. The apparent passivization operation is analyzed as an A’-movement to satisfy an EPP feature of the Top head. The paper is organized as follows. In §2, we present our arguments for the claim that passivization in Shona is not an A-movement. §3 deals with the conflation of subjects and topics in Bantu generally, and §4 outlines our analysis of subject as topic for Shona. Our formal analysis of the Shona passive is presented in §5, and the interplay between passive and topicalization is discussed in §6. Finally, §7 presents our final conclusions and lays out avenues for future work. 2. Passivization in Shona is not A-Movement In Shona, passivization is indicated by the morpheme -w affixed to the verb stem 1 : * Many thanks to our language consultant, Calisto Mudzingwa, for his patience in teaching us his language. Mazviita. We would also like to acknowledge Rose-Marie Déchaine, Eric Vatikiotis-Bateson, our fellow Shona students, and the audience at CLA 2008 for their helpful feedback and suggestions. 1 Unless otherwise specified, all data are from the authors’ fieldwork with a native speaker of the Karanga dialect. Abbreviations are as follows: 1,2,3… = Noun Class 1, 2, 3, …; AGR(eement); APPL(icative); CL(ass); FV = final vowel; IMP(erfective); INF(initive);