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A canonical (or full rearranging) passive conveys the same propositional content as its active counterpart, but differs from it in three respects: (i) the passive subject corresponds to an object in the active construction, (ii) the subject of the active construction is either realized as an oblique or deleted in the passive, and (iii) the verb bears overt morphological marking. There are two main types of passive constructions in Slavic: participial and reflexive. Participial passives are typically formed by the be verb and a participle in - n/- t, originally a resultative verbal…

Antipassive constructions are derived intransitive constructions based on transitive verbs in which the patientive argument is demoted to an oblique position or left unexpressed. There are no dedicated antipassive markers in Slavic, but several subtypes of reflexive verbs meet the definition of antipassive. In particular, all Slavic languages have reflexive constructions in which the patientive participant remains unexpressed. The unexpressed participant is interpreted as unspecified in s…

In all Slavic languages except Polish, there are passive constructions marked with the verbal reflexive marker (clitic or affix). Canonical passives do not affect the propositional content of the sentence and are used for the syntactic rearrangement of arguments (demotion or deletion of subject and promotion of the direct object). Reflexive passives are typically agentless throughout Slavic; overt expression of demoted agents is impossible in many West and South Slavic languages. Reflexi…