Abstract
In the transition from Latin to Early Romance the synthetic passive forms were lost, followed by a restructuring of the voice system. The reinterpretation of originally perfective passive forms as imperfective passive resulted in a periphrastic be-passive that was ambiguous between an imperfective and a perfective reading. This ambiguity favoured the rise of innovated passive auxiliaries that grammaticalised from verbs such as venire ‘come’, fieri ‘become’, facere ‘do’, or stare ‘stand’. In parallel, Romance languages generalised argument reduction processes using the weakened reflexive se/si (from Latin sibi) and developed pronominal agent-backgrounding strategies, based on third person plural and second person singular personal pronouns, the numeral one and the noun homo ‘man’.
