Re: Help on Verbs...

Ed Heil wrote:
>
> Nik Taylor wrote:
>
> > Reflexive and reciprocative are two others.
> >
> > Reflexive means that the subject acts on him/herself, like "He
> > killed himself", it's similar to middle, and I'm not clear exactly
> > what the difference is.
>
> I think Ray explained once that "middle voice" is a name for a
> particular Indo-European morphological category, not a
> cross-linguistic descriptive term.  So its meaning is idiosyncratic to
> the Indo-European language family (it survived in particular in Greek,
> and perhaps in a few others -- Sansrkit?  I'm not sure).
Ray and others have explained that in the Middle Voice the verb is
neither
passive nor active, and the subject is its own object.  So "I killed
myself,"
"I got myself up," "I washed myself", etc. etc. are all the domain of
the
Middle Voice, which is best developed in classical Greek, I believe in
having its own forms.

Sally
>
> In Greek, there were active verb forms, passive verb forms, and
> middle verb forms, which had either a reflexive or a
> "self-benefactive" meaning ("I did this for myself")...  In some
> tenses there were no passive forms which had distinct forms from the
> middle, and so one can speak of "middle-passive" or "medio-passive"
> forms -- forms which looked like middles but which could also have the
> meanings of passive forms.
Ooooh, don't get me started on mediopassives!  There we get into
constructions
like "the soup cooks nicely."  This was a squabble about terms, as I
recall.
Whether or not Trask and others were right in using the term
mediopassive for
such constructions.  I still don't know what to call that construction.

> (To further complicate the issue there are "deponent" verbs which are
> middle or occasionally passive in form but have only active
> meanings... And some verbs are deponent only in certain tenses!...)
These are different.
Sally
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