I should preface all of this by saying that you should really work through Carl's stuff, as Stephen says.
Brett wrote:Is Mounce referring to how a Greek Middle is translation into English?
Most definitely. Little that Mounce says about Greek here exists in the language itself. It's all about translation because that's what his grammar teaches students to do: translate.
Brett wrote:As far as the affinity between the Greek Active and Middle, the Active and Middle both can have the Subject-Agent of the Verb performing the action; the Passive is on the other end of the spectrum. This was behind my comment on the affinity between the Active and Middle. The Middle of course may not be performing the action, but may be consenting to or endorsing the action (hence, not at all the Passive sense grammatically; of course, we may find out that a Middle Voice action led to the Passive construct ["they were condemned" may be true in virtue of the fact that "they brought about their own condemnation"]). The affinity between the Greek Middle and Passive is that they share the same Forms; otherwise, they are quite dissimilar when an Agent is involved.
Middle can, indeed, have agent subjects, but only when that agent subject is performing an action that somehow affects the agent. Considering the following clause (sorry its from Homer--it's my "go-to" example):
ἔς ῥ᾽ ἀσαμίνθους βάντες ἐϋξέστας λούσαντο. Homer, Iliad 10.576
‘Then having climbed into the well polished bathing tubs they...
The last word--the middle--could have any of the following meanings:
(a) washed themselves (direct reflexive)
(b) washed each other (reciprocal middle)
(c) were (automatically) cleansed (spontaneous process)
(d) were washed.’ (passive middle)
As you can see, even when there's an agent involved, its always affected--as Carl said, subject affectedness is the main point of the middle. The very fact that passivisity is a possible interpretation in a given middle for demonstrates the relationship between them--λούσαντο doens't necessitate an agent. The agency of the event for most middles is determined by the context, not by the inflectional form.
Here's an LXX example of the same verb:
καὶ αἱ πόρναι ἐλούσαντο ἐν τῷ αἵματι κατὰ τὸ ῥῆμα κυρίου, ὃ ἐλάλησεν.
"And the prostitutes washed (
themselves in? each other in? were washed in? were cleansed by?) the blood according to the word of the Lord" 3 Kingdoms 22:38.
Yuck. Sorry. Gross example--and granted, the passive "were cleansed by the blood" doesn't work in context. But it is an interesting example of difference between the Hebrew and the Greek, nonetheless!
Other middle verbs require the subject be an agent by the inherent lexical semantics: πορεύομαι and its derivatives (traditionally termed "deponents."
Καὶ εἰσπορεύονται εἰς Καφαρναούμ. Mark 1:21.
And they went to Capernaum.
So here we have an agent. The problem is that English doesn't have anything like this, particular kind of middle--but it is extremely common in languages that have inflectional morphology for middle to use them for verbs denoting the bodily motion of the subject. A friend of my is working on middles in the Saharan language family, specifically on Beria. And his language has the very same phenomenon as Greek (again, unlike English). In Beria, intransitive verbs may be marked with an affix that denotes the subject is an agent or one that denotes the subject as a patient. And like Greek, bodily motion can be marked by the middle morphology
precisely because such motion involves the affectedness of the subject. If you're interested in the middle across languages, I would encourage you to read either Kemmer (1993) or Klaiman (1991).
I suppose that I should also link to my own discussions of middle voice. Hopefully, its a useful supplement to Carl's quite excellent work:
http://evepheso.wordpress.com/studies-i ... diathesis/
...and my wife's thesis on the Greek middle will hopefully be completed by April...hopefully...
Brett wrote:As far as English grammar, I'm not aware of an "English Middle." To my knowledge, English grammars today do not acknowledge a Middle Voice. I think your example "The door closed" in English is grammatically unconventional, or perhaps an idiomatic expression. We all know what is meant (the door was closed by someone or something, such as wind or gravity), and if the awkward expression is unpacked, we end up with a Passive construct. In other examples in which one might try to create a Middle sense in English, you often will end up with an Active Voice.
Okay, so perhaps my sentence wasn't as great as I thought it was, though I'm not necessarily convinced that its unconventional, but I do know that English grammars do discuss middles--but English middles are lexical, not morphological, like Greek. The two English grammars that I own, both have discussions of them. There's a section middle verbs in Quirk, Green Baum and Svartvik (1985:735-6), though their example are transitive verbs where mine is intransitive:
"Jack doesn't
possess a life insurance policy."
This sentence cannot be passivised--just like your chart says--you don't hear people saying: "A life insurance policy isn't possessed by Jack." This is probably what your chart was talking about--English middles. Not especially in this example that they provide that the subject is most definitely not an agent--there isn't any action for an agent to perform.
Consider also two more of my own:
"Porcelain breaks easily."
"The boat sank."
Pullum & Huddleston (2002) discussed the same concepts in their section on transitivity patterns (pages 297ff.), particularly where the object of one clause corresponds to the subject of another:
The sun radiates heat. vs. Heat radiates from the sun.
The bush sprouted new shoots. vs. New shoots sprouted from the bush.
English also drops reflexive objects from verbs that directly affect the subject (Pullum & Huddleston 2002:302):
I must shave.
...bathe
...shower
...undress
...pack
They limit the use of the term "middle" in English to intransitives. They're work quoting in full:
Pullum & Huddleston 2002: 307-8 wrote:In this case the transitive use is primary and the intransitive is interpreted as having an unexpressed causer. ... There are just two categories in the syntactic system of voice in English, active and passive. She doesn't frighten easily is active in form, but it has some semantic affinity with the passive, and it is in this semantic sense that it can be thought of as intermediate between ordinary actives and passives: we put scare quotes around the term [in their section heading] to signal that it is being used in an extended sense and is not interpreted as denoting a formal category in the voice system.
Intransitives like She doesn't frighten easily characteristically have the following properties:
i A causer (normally human) is implied but can't be expressed in a by phrase
ii The clause is concerned with whether and how (especially how readily) the subject-referent undergoes the process expressed in the verb
iii The clause is negative, or is headed by a modal auxiliary (especially will, or contains an adjunct of manner (such as well or easily).
vi. The clause expresses a general state, not a particular event.
But to some extent you're correct. The English middle isn't a participant of the voice system, but it's still very present in the language.
Kemmer, Suzanne. 1993. The Middle Voice. Typological Studies in Language 23. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Klaiman, Miriam H. 1991. Grammatical voice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Huddleston, Rodney D. and Pullum, Geoffrey K. 2002. The Cambridge grammar of the English language. Cambridge University Press.
Quirk, Randolph, et al. 1985. A comprehensive grammar of the English language. Harlow: Longman.