Passive in Jamaican creole: Phonetically empty but syntactically active

Because Jamaican Creole lacks the familiar morphological indicators of the passive that characterize English, its lexifier language, it has sometimes been assumed that Jamaican either lacks a passive, or that its passive is f undamentally different from that of English. However, a Government and Bind ing analysis explicitly shows that Jamaican Creole has a passive and that i t is formed, syntactically, in the same way as morphologically signaled pas sives, including that of English. The conclusion is that there is, indeed, a passive morpheme in Jamaican Creole which, though devoid of phonetic cont ent, behaves the same as the overt passive morphemes of other languages.