Middle and Passive

kent lee k-lee7 at students.uiuc.edu
Tue Dec 10 12:53:12 EST 2002



   Hi, I'm new to the list, but i'd like to chip in on the M/P discussion,
as one with more of a background in linguistics than specifically in Greek.

   I find the term middle as used among biblical scholars conflates
several different things, some of which overlap structurally with active
and passive in different languages. These have to be understood in terms
of semantic argument structure (theta roles, semantic roles in some
linguistic theories), which don't necessarily correspond to grammatical
functions like subject and object.
   The doer of an action is an Agent, and an item affected directly by the
action is a Patient; for example: 'Mary [A] whacked Bill [P] with a fish',
'Bill [P] was whacked by Mary [A] with a fish'. This generally corresponds
to the subject/object distinction, but that's mainly true of transitive
verbs only. One class of intransitive verbs takes or can take Patients as
subjects, where the subject is affected by the action -- in English and
German, these are often verbs of change of state and related verb classes
(in German they take 'sein' for the perfect; in English they can fit into
there-constructions like 'there goes/exists/seems/arose + PREP/ADV
phrase'). These are called ergatives (unfortunately, some linguists use
different terms or use ergative for other things), which are a fairly
recently discovered linguistic critter, so their properties and what all
verbs belong in that class are not fully understood.
   This is different from a true middle, which has more of a reflexive
notion (e.g., Agent and Patient are the same). Ergative notions can be
expressed differently by different verbs in different languages. So in the
case of the MP verb under discussion here, we have to look at the verb and
the context carefully to see what is going on. If no agent is expressed, a
very good possibility is that it could be an ergative, a change of state
expression in this case, where the emphasis is on the change in the
condition of the sentence subject, with concern for agentivity at all.
   I don't know this particular verb well enough as my Greek is more limited,
but we have to compare the possibilities [true middle, impying 'he raised
himself', passive, implying 'someone else raised him, ergative, simple
change of state], and my guess here is that the ergative interpretation
may be more warranted. One has to be careful about simply translating,
e.g., passives strictly as passives, because the semantic and functional
roles don't map onto each other in the same way across languages.

peace,
kent lee

University of Illinois @ Urbana-Champaign





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