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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.
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