The Latin passive morpheme /-r/ and its morphosyntactic similarity with Romance si

Abstract

Abstract Latin synthetic passive forms display a suffixal /-r/ that is added to the AGR endings (cf. am-ā-t vs. am-ā-t-[u]-r ‘love-pres-3sg-act/pass’ (cf. Meillet 1964, Ernout and Thomas 1951/1972, Weiss 2009). The positioning of this voice morpheme to the periphery of AGR violates the basic generalizations on the positioning of verbal functional elements, according to which Voice should have a very low position in the extended projection of the verb close to v0 and probably lower than Asp0 (Cinque 1999, Zyman and Kalivoda 2020). In this chapter, I will propose an analysis of this positioning based on the close similarity between the morpho-syntactic distribution of the Latin passive morpheme /-r/ and the Romance clitic si in terms of Schäfer’s (2008) analysis of si-constructions in Romance and Distributed Morphology (Halle and Marantz 1993).