Passive Constructions in Icibemba: A Minimalist Analysis of Argument Reorganisation and Agreement

This article examines passive constructions in Icibemba, a Bantu language spoken in Zambia, within the Minimalist Programme of Transformational Generative Grammar. Data come from elicitation tasks, grammaticality judgement tasks, and audio recordings collected in two secondary schools in Mungwi District. The study investigates how passivisation in Icibemba involves argument reorganisation, structural promotion of the internal argument, passive verbal morphology, and agreement adjustment. The findings show that Icibemba passives follow systematic structural constraints rather than simple surface rearrangement. Participants accepted passive constructions when the promoted noun phrase and verbal agreement were compatible, while rejecting or treating as marginal forms with agreement mismatches or unclear argument roles. The data reveal that passivisation in Icibemba is governed by feature-driven movement: the internal argument moves to subject position to satisfy the Extended Projection Principle and case requirements. Passivisation is not merely a stylistic paraphrase but a principled syntactic operation involving A-movement, agreement, and argument structure reorganisation. The article contributes to Zambian linguistics by providing a formal account of Icibemba passive syntax and to pedagogical practice by suggesting how a structural understanding of passivisation can support grammar instruction.