Evidence-based answer · Last updated · How it’s made
"Passive-causative" structures are sentences that combine a language's causative marking (making someone do something) with its passive marking (something being done to someone) on the same verb, often producing a meaning where the person forced to do something is presented as the affected party — as in "Taro was made to run" rather than "someone made Taro run. " They are best documented in Japanese and Korean, where a single verb can carry both a causative suffix and a passive suffix, but similar interactions between causative and passive marking occur cross-linguistically, including in English, Chinese, French, Bantu languages, and others.
Answered for language learning in general. No specific language was set for this question, so the findings are drawn from general second-language research rather than one language’s literature.
A passive-causative (also called causative-passive) is a verb form in which causative morphology (marking that someone caused an event) and passive morphology (marking that the subject was affected rather than acting) are combined on a single predicate, producing a construction where the person who was caused to do something is also grammatically demoted, as if something was done to them.3,7,12,14
In plain terms
The clearest and most intensively studied examples of passive-causative structures come from Japanese and Korean, where the causative suffix (Japanese -sase) and the passive suffix (Japanese -rare) can be layered on the same verb stem, and Korean shows related causative-passive correlations with shared verbal morphology.1,3,6,7,14
When causative and passive marking combine in Japanese, the resulting sentence typically conveys that the person who was made to do something experienced it as unwelcome or imposed on them, and this reading is described as marginal or degraded when the person forced to act is a willing or highly agentive participant.3
Example
When passive and causative suffixes are nested together in a single Japanese verb (causative plus passive, or passive plus causative in sequence), standard automated language-processing tools and even some published grammatical treebanks make incorrect predictions about what the sentence means, showing that these nested constructions are genuinely complex to formalize correctly.7
Related causative-passive correlations and interactions are also documented outside Japanese and Korean, including in Chinese, English, French, and Bantu languages such as Lubukusu and Tshiluba, where causative markers combine with passive markers on the same verb and interact with the language's argument structure.8,13,15,16
These sources are technical linguistics literature rather than language-learning guides, so the practical takeaway is mainly conceptual: if you are learning a language like Japanese or Korean, expect to encounter verb forms where a causative suffix and a passive suffix are stacked together, and expect these forms to often carry a connotation of being forced or inconvenienced (not just a neutral 'was made to do X'). When studying grammar, it can help to isolate the causative and passive pieces separately first, and then practice recognizing them combined, since even automated language tools struggle with these nested forms, which suggests learners should not expect them to be simple or perfectly regular either.
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