The distinction between adjectival passives and verbal passives is well-known in linguistic literature at least since Wasow (1977). Much debate is centered round the nature of the operation that forms adjectival passives (Levin and Rappaport 1986, Dubinsky and Simango 1996, among many others). In addition, recent studies have revealed that the class of adjectival passives, at least in some languages, is not homogenous (Kratzer 2000, Anagnostopolou 2003, Embick 2004).
This paper aims to define the operation that forms adjectival passives in Hebrew. It is shown that these adjectives do not form a homogenous group; rather, they can be classified into two types. It is then claimed that a simple way to account for the interpretation and syntactic behavior of these two classes, as well as to predict which adjectives belong to which class, is by appealing to two operations that are well-known from the verbal system – the operations that form passive and unaccusative verbs.