This paper provides an analysis of passive constructions in Thai and their grammatical relations.  Thai is said to present two types of passive, distinguished mainly by a semantic factor, the affectedness of the passive's subject.  The two categories can be labeled as adversative passive and non-adversative passive.  The adversative passive, similar to Chinese, is syntactically marked by the verb of reception thùuk/doon meaning 'touch' inserted before the main verb to indicate that its subject is negatively effected.

There is a problem in the structural classification of the adversative type.  Structurally, it seems not to be the so-called "prototypical passive" like English and French.  That is to say, the insertion of the passive marker results in a string of verbs and the status of the passive's Agent does not seem to be marked as an oblique like that of a typical passive.  These observations might lead us to treat adversative passives as serial-verb constructions rather than passive-construction derivations.

In the present paper, we argue that the "adversative passive" in Thai has distinctive syntactic and semantic properties and thus should be differentiated from typical serial-verb constructions.  The adversative passive has a particular way of being derived from its corresponding active clause.  We present sytactic evidence, such as extractability, corresponding active clauses, deduction of active subjects, and movements of active subjects, to prove that the adversative passive is monoclausal and should be considered as a passive construction where a reassignment of grammatical relations occurs within the clause, unlike the multiclausal character of serial verb constructions.

As for the non-adversative type, it is constructed in the more typical passive fashion.  That is to say, besides alternating with its corresponding active clause, it active object is promoted to subject and its active subject is demoted to an oblique, as obviously signaled by an oblique marker dooy 'by'.  This type of passive is believed to be adopted from English via translation.

It is also found that, like some other languages, Thai passives can occur both with transitive and ditransitive verbs.  For ditransitive verbs, the passivization is restricted to verbs whose two objects are patient and Dative-Benefactive, respectively.  The Thai passives do not apply to intransitive verbs at all.  In general, the Thai passives look structurally similar to topicalizations, but certain properties, such as the absence of subjects and the ability to be operated in nominalization and relativization, can distinguish them from topicalizations.

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