Re: Test for middle voice?

On 11/19/05, Henrik Theiling <theiling@...> wrote:
>
> Hi!
>
> R A Brown <ray@...> writes:
> >... In the strict sense, English does not have a middle _voice_,
> >i.e. a grammatically category distinguished morphologically from
> >active and passive. ...
>
> I'd say that modern English does have some kind of systematic middle.
> More than than, say, German. You have a lot of transitive verbs that
> work well intransitively for the object* of the transitive verb used
> as the *subject* of the transitive one. This is quite close to a
> distinct syntactic category, and it is often kind of a middle voice:


Yes, but I believe Ray's point was that it is not syntactically
distinguished. The "middle voice" verbs you cite are indistinguishable in
form from their active counterparts. In "The cup fills [with water]", the
verb "fills" is syntactically and morphologically in the active voice,
regardless of how you choose to distinguish its semantic role.

--
Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>

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