Passive By-Phrases in Greek and English : Adjuncts or Arguments ?

1 Passive By-Phrases in Greek and English: Adjuncts or Arguments? Nikos Angelopoulos, Chris Collins, Arhonto Terzi UCLA, NYU, TEI of W. Greece Abstract: Alexiadou et al. (2015:35) argue that Greek by-phrases merge as adjuncts. This is assumed for English and other languages by Bruening (2013) and Legate (2014). On the other hand, Hasegawa (1988), Goodall (1997, 1999), Mahajan (1994) and Collins (2018), argue that the by-phrase merges syntactically as an argument. This paper shows that in Greek and English by-phrases behave like arguments in being able to bind non-exempt anaphors. As a consequence, we argue that external arguments (in both the passive and the active) are not generated in Spec VoiceP, but rather in Spec vP, as in Chomsky (1995).