It is generally acknowledged that Japanese has two kinds of passives, direct passives and indirect passives. We have argued in another paper that direct passives involve an existential quantification and decrease the number of the arguments by one. In the present paper, we claim that a new argument is added to the predicate in indirect passives. Though the indirect passive of an intransitive verb is simply an operation of adding a new argument, in the case of the indirect passive of a transitive verb, this operation is usually coupled with the existential quantification which is found in direct passives, and hence there is no change in the number of the arguments. We also claim that the indirectness of indirect passives consists in that the newly added argument expresses the indirect theme of the reported event, which has some close relation with the element of the same event denoted by one of the old arguments.

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