Re: Help on Verbs...

Sally Caves wrote:

> Ed Heil wrote:
> > 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.
Actually, "I killed myself," "I got myself up," and "I washed myself"
are all English sentences in the active voice which use a reflexive
pronoun.  English does not have a morphological middle voice, unless
you want to use the term "middle voice" for anything which would be a
good *translation* for what would in Greek go in the middle voice.
Then you're using the term as a lable for a particular semantic
configuration, not a particular morphology.

> 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.
I don't know what to call it either, but it doesn't seem even vaguely
analogous to the Greek middle or passive, so I wouldn't use that term
for it.  Wasn't that a squabble about the "antipassive," and whether
or not it was correct to use the term "antipassive" in a non-ergative
language?

> > (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.
Different than what?

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             edheil@postmark.net
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