Passives of Causatives and Perception Verbs in Italian

Abstract

This paper argues for a phase-based analysis of passivization patterns with causative (fare ‘make’) and perception verbs (vedere ‘see’, guardare ‘watch’) in standard Italian, based on corpus data and acceptability judgements. We show that Italian (long) passives face clear restrictions sensitive to complement type and matrix verb, and argue that, as in English and Brazilian Portuguese, passivation is blocked where a causative/perception verb selects a (VoiceP) phase (Sheehan and Cyrino 2024). Conversely, long passivation is possible where a complement is either: (a) smaller than a phase (VP or vP) or (b) as large as TP, including a low ‘subject position’ feeding onwards A-movement.