Re: Middle voice

Gerald Koenig wrote:
> The interesting thing to me about middle voice is that it is classified
> as a voice. To me it looks like a tense. I notice these features about
> the examples:
> 1. The duration of action is variable. A kind of imperfect tense whose
> beginning and end are unknown, or variable.
> 2.The action occurs past, present, or future.
> 3. It looks repetitive or at least there are multiple instances implied.
I'd call it a restricted voice.  The defining characteristic about voice
is that it determines how the action affects its arguments:

1. Active voice - subject has control over action, and is not [directly]
affected
2. Passive voice - subject has no control over action, and is affected
3. Reflexive voice - subject has control over action, and IS affected
4. Middle - subject may have control over action (and when it does, it's
rarely, if ever, volitional) - "this fruit sells well" - fruit has no
volition, but the selling is a direct result of the fruit's qualities,
and therefore I catagorize it as control.  Subject is also affected.

Middle voice also has a stative element to it, i.e., "this fruit is a
good seller" is a fair paraphrase of "this fruit sells well".  At least,
I think that that's a key element of Middle Voice, it may just be an
idiosyncracy of English.

I think volition may be the key element in distinguishing active from
middle.  Of course, middle is often combined with reflexive or passive,
as in Spanish "La fruta se vende bien", morphologically identical to the
reflexive, and historically a passive as well (_se_ comes from the Latin
reflexive pronoun).

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