[Lingtyp] passive and tense

[Sergey Lyosov]

Dear colleagues,
 
Working with corpora of certain Semitic languages, I noticed that passive verb forms are much more frequent in the past tenses than in present and future tenses. This is also my impression of various languages with which I am familiar but have not studied their verbal systems. Does such cross-linguistic feature exist? If yes, how do we explain it?
 
Best wishes,
 
Sergey
 
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