Middle and Passive
Peter Kirk
prkirk at pmbx.net
Tue Dec 10 22:52:05 EST 2002
Kent, I am confused by your use of "ergative" as a semantic category.
Although I have studied a reasonable amount of semantics, I have some
across the notion of ergativity only as a morphosyntactic concept,
relevant only to some languages. It is indeed unfortunate that different
linguists use the same word for different things; but I suspect that
your use is the minority one and so it is not for you to complain at the
majority use.
But I do wonder if there are traces of morphosyntactic ergativity in
Greek; and specifically of the kind of split ergativity (basically
ergative in the past, non-ergative in the present) which is common in
the Indo-Iranian (division of Indo-European) languages. You mention the
German use of "sein" rather than "haben" as an auxiliary for the past
tense with certain intransitive verbs. Something very similar happens in
French and in Persian: the same morphological past participle has a
passive sense with a transitive verb and an active sense with an
intransitive verb. There are relics of this in English, participles in
-ed of intransitive verbs with an active sense, although use of "to be"
as an auxiliary is archaic e.g. "he is gone". The ergativity is clearest
in French as the past active form of an intransitive verb is identical
to the past passive form of a transitive verb, and there is gender and
number agreement with the transitive patient and the intransitive
subject. In Persian this same phenomenon seems to function as a relic of
a split ergativity system, as clearly found in closely related languages
but less clear in Persian because the morphological distinctions between
cases have been lost.
One way of explaining this phenomenon so widespread among the
Indo-European languages would be to suggest that split ergativity is
part of the common Indo-European heritage. But perhaps the original
split ergativity was rather limited and later became more developed only
in the Indo-Iranian branch. But the wide commonality, which surely
didn't arise independently in so many languages, suggests that at least
the limited ergativity of the past participle form is of genetic origin.
To bring this back to Greek: One might expect to find similar traces of
ergativity in many, though not necessarily all, Indo-European languages,
so including Greek. They would most likely be found in perfective
(aorist/future) and perfect aspects, though perhaps recognisable only by
comparison with the imperfective aspect. (By the way, I have found
knowing Russian very helpful for understanding aspect, especially for
Greek which functions rather similarly.) They would probably be clearer
in older rather than newer stages of the language. One possible such
trace is in intransitive verbs which have an active form in the present
but an MP form in the aorist or future. But then the opposite seems more
common. At the very least, the possibility of this kind of split
ergativity may help to elucidate some oddities of the use of MP forms.
We certainly should not think that careful distinctions between case
roles in actives and passives are a modern phenomenon, a product of
Latin-based grammar and modern philosophy. The linguistic evidence
clearly shows that even the languages of very "primitive" groups e.g.
here in Australia have complex and well-defined systems of ergativity;
and that remote minority groups' languages e.g. in South Asia and Iran
have more developed ergativity than related national languages. The
distinctions between case roles may be more blurred in Greek, although
that would hardly be typical of the language which is usually very
precise, but it may also be that there are very clear distinctions which
have not been fully understood.
Peter Kirk
peter.r.kirk at ntlworld.com
http://web.onetel.net.uk/~peterkirk/
> -----Original Message-----
> From: kent lee [mailto:k-lee7 at students.uiuc.edu]
> Sent: 11 December 2002 04:53
> To: Biblical Greek
> Subject: [b-greek] Re: Middle and Passive
>
>
> 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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