The Passive in Japanese

This book describes and analyzes the passive voice system in Japanese within the framework of generative grammar. By unifying different types of passives conventionally distinguished within the literature, the book advances a simple minimalist account where various passive characteristics emerge from the lexical properties of a single passive morpheme interacting with independently-supported syntactic principles and general properties of Japanese. The book both reevaluates numerous properties previously discussed within the literature and introduces interesting new data collected through experiments. This novel analysis also benefits from considering the important issue of interspeaker variability, in terms of grammaticality judgments and context requirements, and its implications for individual grammar. The book will be of interest not only to students and scholars working on passive constructions, but more generally to scholars working on generative grammar, experimental syntax, language acquisition, and sentence processing.

Shin Fukuda, University of Hawaií at Manoa, in Linguistic Variation 15(2): 291-298:
The book makes an important contribution to our understanding of the morpheme -(r)are by presenting a thorough and careful examination of the relevant data that suggest that the empirical evidence for some widely-held assumptions about Japanese passive is not as strong as commonly assumed. It also makes an important theoretical contribution to the Minimalist Program framework, as it proposes and defends a unified analysis of the different types of sentences with -(r)are based on the smuggling approach to passivization...Any future work on -(r)are should pay close attention to what Ishizuka's careful examinination of the data shows and address the analytical issues that her analysis faces.