Passive-active variants in the Samaritan Pentateuch

Changes of passive predicates in the Masoretic Text (MT) to active predicates in the Samaritan Pentateuch (SP) have long been noted by SP scholars. Most of these changes have been convincingly explained by morpho-phonological and morpho-semantic developments in Samaritan Hebrew (SH), mainly the loss of internal passives and the increased use of Nifʕal to encode passives. However, diachronic developments in SH alone cannot fully explain the passive-active variants found in SP. A sentence-processing evaluation of these variants may help explain the unexpected changes of 48 passive Nifʕal predicates in SP, as well as the retention of over 80% of internal passives in this tradition. It may also illuminate some variants in the opposite direction, i.e., active clauses in MT that appear as passive clauses in SP. It is argued that the non-canonical semantic-syntactic mapping in passive structures, which affects the way passives are interpreted or retrieved, may be involved in the generation of passive-active variants in SP.