The passive construction and participant identification in Cuntou Tuhua

Abstract Cuntou Tuhua, an undocumented Tuhua variety within the Sinitic languages spoken in northern Guangdong, exhibits three types of passive constructions. The la -construction and the piau -construction have developed internally from transitive constructions involving actions of taking and giving, and are typically used to express negative events, with the agent obligatorily present. In contrast, the phai -construction is a borrowed form from Mandarin, used exclusively for positive events and requiring the omission of the agent. The grammaticalization of the la -construction and the piau -construction indicates that they represent a strategy of topicalization. These passive constructions also serve a distinct participant-identification function, arising from the conventionalization of the construction, including determining participant roles and tracking referents in discourse.