Alternation ‘Personal passive’

The direct object of the active corresponds to the subject of the passive. This is the most common type of personal passive constructions. Passive constructions differ from the corresponding active ones only in the topicalized element: active constructions involve topicalized agents expressed by subjects, whereas personal passive constructions involve topicalized patients which are also expressed by subjects. Passivization is accomplished by means of the suffix -v (or its variants -p/-b/-mu/-vuv/-muv/-mup depending on the preceding or the following consonants). Most frequently active transitive verbs are involved in the passivization, e.g. va:- 'kill' - va:-v- 'be killed', o:- 'make', 'build' - o:-v- 'be made', 'be built', misin- 'cut off' - misin-mu 'be cut off', ete- 'finish' - ete-v- 'be finished', uj- 'tie' - ui-v- 'be tied to', baka- 'find' - baka-v- 'be found', ne- 'put', 'lay' - ne-v- 'be put down', 'be laid', iche- 'see' - iche-v- 'be seen'. The direct object of the active verb appears as the subject of the derived passive verb and the subject (agent) of the active verb (if expressed at all) appears, as a rule, in the dative case in the corresponding passive construction. This agentive object is usually missing in personal passive constructions since it is either not known or pragmatically irrelevant.