Fifty years ago, Chomsky (1957: §5.4) argued that passive sentences should be excluded from phrase structure grammar and introduced instead by a transformational rule applying to active sentences. This was because introducing passives through rewriting rules would mean doubling the selectional restrictions independently imposed on actives, while a transformational rule would allow them to be stated only once. Chomsky (1965: 103–4) provides what has remained the standard conceptualization of this transformational process by proposing that

In current practice, the by-phrase is independently generated by Merge; but the analysis whereby passive is defined by ‘substitution’ of an internal argument for the EPP position (second or internal Merge) remains at the core of generative transformational grammar.

In this chapter we propose to evaluate this analysis in the light of data from Albanian, which provides two separate and complementary phenomena of interest. On the one hand, the passive (i.e. promotion of the internal argument to the EPP position with the external argument independently interpreted) has the same lexicalization as the reflexive, the anticausative and the impersonal. The question then is whether all of these different interpretations are associated with the same underlying syntax.