Re: Test for middle voice?

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:

Verbs I have in mind:

   act: I fill the cup.
   med: The cup fills.

in contrast to:
   pass: The cup is filled.

Some things work in German, too, but less systematically (e.g. 'to
cook' works the same in German, but 'to fill' needs a reflexive
pronoun to work).

Etc.

The way I intuitively understood middle voice was looking at some
examples of Ancient Greek.  E.g. that 'to appear' (phainomai, the stem
of 'phenomenon') is middle voice of 'to show'.  It's clear that 'to be
shown' (the passive voice) is not the same as 'to appear' (the middle
voice) and this difference is just the point: it is shown, but no-one
shows -- the agent is missing (nicely compares to 'the cup is filled'
-- 'the cup fills)'.

This example also shows (for me) quite clearly the link between the
reflexive nature of the Greek middle voice, and OTOH, why many e.g.
German uses a reflexive to immitate middle voice ('die Tasse füllt
*sich*'): 'to show oneself' is close to 'to appear', and I think this
reflexive nature stems from the 'pure' middle nature.  Of course, an
entity without any control cannot show (or fill) *itself*, but it
appears (or 'fills').  This is the original middle nature.  But when
humans appear, they strictly show themselves (with control).

This is a personal explanation, or way of understanding.  But maybe it
helps in understanding the middle voice intuitively. :-)

**Henrik

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