More on Kena-passives in Singapore English

In the so-called kena-passive construction in Singapore English (Bao and Wee ), the morphosyntactic realization of the passive feature of irregular verbs is optional (John kena caught/?catch) in contrast to the obligatory realization of the same feature within the English-derived be-passive (John was caught/*catch). We propose that this asymmetry follows from the hybrid syntactic structures of the kena-passive construction. Specifically, we argue that the verb kena allows not only the standard passive structure of the type discussed by Bao and Wee but also the active structure which embeds a sentential complement comprised of pro and the active verb. This analysis is supported by a variety of arguments regarding the kena-active complement structure independently available in Singapore English (Yap and Lim ) as well as Chinese (Feng ; Huang ) and Baba Malay (Ansaldo and Matthews ), which have been hypothesized in the literature as the two major substrate languages of Singapore English.