Re: Help on Verbs...

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).

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.

(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!...)

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