The Use of the Passive in Ćwarmin

 The passives in Ćwarmin have some interesting properties. The first example is that first and second person objects cannot be made subjects of passives. The passive is purely a third person affair. The first and second person, however, obtain similar meaning-changing operations by simply omitting the subject as well as any congruence markers on the verb. The omission of congruence markers will be indicated by a dash here. First and second person obliques can be dealt with in similar manners, and in those cases, a regular object can be present as well. For all these, the personal pronoun has to go first in the clause:

ataś bur-
me hear-
I am heard

bacanś casmun-
you.dat plead.past
you were pleaded for

As for larger scale syntactical things, these pronouns basically are subjects - they can control reflexives:

aranś imrəkemwin digərsin-
me.dat skill.refl_acc-pauc teach.past
I was taught my skills

As a small lexical sidetrack, 'imrək-' signifies 'tricks of the trade' rather than skills in general when in the paucal number.

For third person objects, however, passivization is permissible. What in the corresponding active clause would have been the object is now the subject. It has, syntactically speaking, all the properties of a subject - it controls reflexives, can be referred to by subject gap-anaphora, etc.

i buraśp aji rawwu
(s)he hear-pass, not talk-3sg
(s)he is heard but doesn't say (anything)

There are some semantic restrictions on passivization, however:

• The action must affect the state of its patient, or pertain to the two main modes of perception - being heard or seen ('... is loved' is thus not possible. This is instead solved by using lexemes with different argument structure.)
• The action must be performed by animate agents ('... was killed in an accident' is thus not possible.)

The dative-passive is more lax on these, and sometimes is used instead of the regular passive for verbs that fail the first of the two requirements above. The dative-passive is also used with other obliques, for which, however, the case marking is preserved

indirect object:
i kuroduwuc tombažbul
he horse-pauc.acc pay_tribute.dat_pass
(s)he is given a few horses in tribute

lack of physical effect:
i serəžbel
(s)he greet.dat_pass
(s)he is greeted

lack of physical effect:
i caswažbul
(s)he plead.dat_pass
(s)he is pleaded for

lack of physical effect:
i saŋažbul
(s)he love.dat_pass
(s)he is loved

lack of animate agent, particularly odd verb:
i wardažbul
she is menstruating (formed as a passive; the active verb wardan means bleed)

The dative passive's subject is not as fully subject-like as that of the regular passive: it does not pass the gap-coordination test, and the only reflexives it controls is that of the reflexively possessed accusative (which sometimes does pattern differently from reflexives in general):

i ćatansun paražbul
(s)he passage-refl permit.dat_pass
(s)he is permitted his/her passage
his/her passage is permitted

however,
*i₁ uta₁ ćatnutus paražbul
(s)he his/her passage.acc is permitted
If i and uta refer to different nouns, this is permissible; it then means, basically 'on person 1's account, person 2's passage is permitted'

*inin ćatnutus paražbul
3sg.dist_poss_subj passage.acc permit-dat.pas
The use of distant possessive subjects is fully impossible with all passives.

The dative passive has less markings permissible for TAM distinctions than the regular passive does, thus making the regular passive preferrable whenever permissible.

-Aśp combines with the immediate past -AmcE to form the rather assimilated -aunce, -əince. With the non-immediate past it combines to form -imeśp, -uwaśp. 

The dative passive conflates the two past tenses in the morpheme -inwil, -unwul.