SFRAGIZW: middle or passive?
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Mon Oct 21 11:32:55 EDT 2002
At 6:55 AM -0700 10/21/02, waldo slusher wrote:
>Iver
>
>> If I say "How can I make myself understood", I see
>> this as a grammatical
>> surface derivation based on two underlying semantic
>> propositions: 1) What
>> can I do/say/write? and 2) so that (people)
>> understand me.
>> The first is active, the second becomes passive in
>> the surface form - so
>> that I be understood - when the agent is suppressed.
While I may have more to respond later to Iver about this, I'll say now
that he seems to be shifting the analysis into what I think used to be
called Chomskian transformational grammar; while that may be useful for
analytic purposes, I don't think it helps at all with the question of what
the Greek voices may be understood to mean, and although I did offer
English formulations to indicate what I understood the Greek voice-forms as
conveying, I really don't want to deal with the question in terms of any
particular target language but only in terms of ancient Greek.
>How do you distinguish an Active Voice with an
>Intransitive Verb, with a Middle Voice?
I'm not altogether sure what you mean by this, Waldo; is it, "How can the
active voice of an intransitive verb be distinguished from a middle voice
of the same verb?" IF that's what you're asking, one thing that comes to my
mind is the perfect-tense-form hESTHKA ("I am standing"), which is "active"
in terms of its morphoparadigm and is certainly intransitive; one might
contrast with it the present-tense-form hISTAMAI ("I am in the process of
coming to a stand [whether from a seated or reclining position or from a
state of movement]").
One of the points we had agreed upon in our on-list discussions of October
and November of 2001 was that intransitive verbs may be found in all three
voice-morphoparadigms in ancient Greek. I thought we had also agreed in
those discussions that semantic active, middle and passive senses were not
restricted to the respective active, so-called middle-passive, and
so-called passive morphoparadigms. I gather from Iver's message of this
morning that he really doesn't want to talk about semantic voice any more.
It certainly does appear that the problems of understanding distinctions of
voice in ancient Greek verbs in which the morphoparadigm itself does/did
not distinguish middle from passive is considerably more complex than we
had hitherto supposed.
--
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu OR cwconrad at ioa.com
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/
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