This section deals with alternations between active and passive constructions. The characteristic property of these constructions is that the external argument of the verb is demoted to adjunct status, i.e. it is no longer realized as the subject of the clause, but e.g. in an agentive door-PP. The demotion of the external argument seems to be the most important property of passivization, since it immediately explains the fact that intransitive verbs differ from unaccusative verbs in that only intransitive verbs can undergo this process; unaccusative verbs cannot be passivized, since they have no external argument. This is illustrated again in (17); cf. also Section 2.1.2.

If the verb is (di)transitive, the demotion of the external argument has the concomitant effect that one of the objects in the active construction is promoted to subject. If the verb is transitive, as in (18), it is the direct object that is promoted to subject.

If the verb is ditransitive, as in (19), either the direct or the indirect object is promoted to subject; the choice depends on the passive auxiliary that is used: if the passive auxiliary is worden or zijn, as in (19b), the direct object is promoted; if the auxiliary is krijgen, as in (19c), the indirect object is promoted.

Note in passing that it is sometimes claimed that the verb zijn in examples such as (19b) is not a passive but a perfect auxiliary, which is assumed to select an empty verb corresponding to the past participle form of the “true” passive auxiliary worden. This assumption is supported by the fact that the participle geworden can be used in southern varieties of Dutch; we will not discuss this claim here, but will return to it in Section 6.2.2.

It is generally assumed that the promotion of one of the objects to subject is due to the fact that the passive morphology on the participle “absorbs” one of the cases that would normally be assigned to an internal argument of the active verb; the internal argument that is deprived of its case must therefore be assigned nominative case, which is only possible if the external argument is demoted to adjunct. That case assignment is indeed involved in the promotion of the direct/indirect object is clear from the fact that the nominal part of PP-complements like naar Marie in (20a) is not promoted to subject; since the nominal part of the PP-complement is assigned case by the preposition, there is no need to assign it nominative case. See Section 3.2.1.3, sub IVB, for further discussion.

Passive constructions corresponding to active constructions with an intransitive (PO-)verb do not have a derived subject (i.e. an internal argument marked with nominative case) and are therefore often called impersonal passives. Passive constructions corresponding to active constructions with a (di)transitive verb, on the other hand, always have a subject and can therefore be called personal passives. Personal passives can be further divided according to whether the subject corresponds to the direct or indirect object of their active counterparts. We will name these passives according to the auxiliaries they use, but since worden-passives are the most common, they are sometimes also called regular passives; the less frequent krijgen-passives are sometimes also called semi-passives (a term that also reflects a long but erroneous tradition of considering the krijgen-passive as unproductive).

type		subject corresponds to	example	section
impersonal passive		—	(17a') & (20b)	3.2.1.2
personal passive	worden-passive	direct object	(18b) & (19b)	3.2.1.3
	krijgen-passive	indirect object	(19c)	3.2.1.4

The rest of this section is organized as follows. Section 3.2.1.1 begins with a discussion of some general properties of the passive. Then the three types of passive constructions are discussed in more detail in the sections indicated in the last column of Table 1.