In a syntacticocentric morphology, morphological operations must obey what Koontz-Garboden (2010) called the Monotonicity Hypothesis: syntactic and semantic functors can be added, but not deleted, by morphological processes. In fact, there are only two ways in which a morpheme realizing the head of a terminal node in the syntax can affect the argument structure of the clause in which it occurs: by requiring (or not) a specifier, and/or by selecting for a complement XP with particular properties.These constraints alone entail that VoiceP, the locus of external argument introduction and of passive morphology, must be separate from the vP or VP constituent which includes a verb's internal arguments. Related issues include the role of Voice in the +human requirement on many verbal passives, the dynamicity requirement on many such passives, and the problem of passive morphology on unaccusative and raising predicates. In this course, we will explore these and other issues from a syntacticocentric perspective on the passive, with special attention to data from Italian and Hiaki.