Re: Help on Verbs...

From: Ed Heil <edheil@...>

> > > 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.
I would agree that calling these constructions middle-voice is something of
a stretch.  Middle-voice translations inevitably wind up as active
voice/reflexive sentences.  English has no middle, period.

Interestingly, Rick Morneau in his wonderful paper on Lexical Semantics
interprets voice as essentially a valency modifying operator, an
interpretation that I find powerfully analytical.  For Rick, both passive
and middle voice involve a demotion of the A-function argument of the
underlying active predicate.  The distinction between the two is that this
demoted argument is optionally expressable in passive constructions but not
expressable at all in middle constructions.  (Is Rick on this list?  If so,
did I get that right?)  Of course this refers to what is sometimes called
the mediopassive and not the reflexive-like middle exemplified above.

> 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?
If we view voice as a valency modifying operator, antipassive makes just as
much sense for a non-ergative language as an ergative one, it just has less
semantic value and probably no sysntactic import.  In an antipassive
construction, the underlying P-function argument is demoted, but may be
expressed obliquely.  The underlying A-function argument goes into derived
S-function.  This construction gives topical prominence to the agent while
rendering the patient either unexpressed or obliquely referenced.  Thus

Active:  The boy [A] kissed the girl [P]
Antipassive: *The boy [A] kissed (P implied)
                      *The boy [A] kissed, the girl[Obl]
(The antipassive glosses are necessarily strained since English has no
antipassive.)

These are manipulations of syntactic relations independent of case.

 David

>
> > > (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?
>
> -------------------------------------------------
>              edheil@postmark.net
> -------------------------------------------------
>