In this talk, I discuss the morphosyntactic properties of the active-passive alternation in a variety of languages, building on my original fieldwork on Lithuanian (Baltic) and Ndebele (Bantu). The active-passive alternation, as in (i) "Stella broke the vase" vs. (ii) "The vase was broken (by Stella)," is one of the most central phenomena in theoretical linguistics. In the passive construction in (ii), the object "the vase" becomes the subject, and the initiator "Stella" is demoted i.e., appears in an optional by-phrase. The range of phenomena that have been called passive voice in various languages is vast. This raises the question of what the universal properties of passives are, and which properties of this construction are subject to cross-linguistic variation. I compare canonical passives, like (ii), to non-canonical passives, which lack some of the properties present in (ii), showing that languages drastically vary in the types of passives they exhibit. I argue that the defining feature of passive voice in many cases is the demotion of the initiator (Bruening 2013; Legate 2014; Legate et al. 2020; Šereikaitė 2022, in prep; contra Collins 2005), although the way the initiator is demoted may also vary across languages (Šereikaitė 2020, 2021, 2022). This empirical discovery enriches the typology of voice in important ways and provides us with a better understanding of passivization and its limitations in human language.

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