[B-Greek] Deponents (was 2nd aorsit ... FOLLOW UP)

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Wed Mar 31 17:41:18 EST 2004


At 11:23 AM -0600 3/31/04, Joseph Weaks wrote:
>On Mar 31, 2004, at 10:15 AM, Eddie Mishoe wrote:
>> Carl:
>> Are you saying the so called deponent verbs are only
>> remain deponent in a given root?
>
>Well, he wouldn't use the "D" word, but yes. A verb can be "deponent"
>(semantic active, not existing in active morphological form) in one
>principal part and not in another.

I'm a bit curious, Joe, about how you are defining "semantic active." We
had much discussion in November of 2002 on this list about distinguishing
active, middle, and passive in semantic terms as opposed to the
morphoparadigms representing them. This is important for the question
whether we should continue to speak of "deponent" verbs. It might
theoretically make sense to define a "deponent" verb as a verb that doesn't
have an active morphoparadigm--although it seems to me it would make more
sense to try to understand WHY a verb appears in a middle-passive
morphoparadigm in Greek. I think that it's not appropriate to define a
GREEK verb as a "deponent" on the basis of whether we use an active verb to
translate it in another language--assuming, for instance, that "come" is
active in English (although in archaic English the perfect tense was "is
come" rather than "has come") and must therefore really have a SEMANTIC
active meaning. Of course the truth is that it is intransitive.

My contention is that the so-called "active" and "middle-passive"
morphoparadigms are not rightly understood in terms of the voices of verbs
in English or another language other than Greek, indeed that there are
Greek verbs with active morphoparadigms that may bear a passive semantic
sense (PIPTW "be killed in battle", APOQNHiSKW "be executed", PASCW "be
mistreated", and some others); I would contend also that the usage of
"active" and "middle-passive" morphoparadigms bears no necessary
relationship to whether or not a verb is transitive and takes an object but
is determined primarily by whether or not the meaning of the verb is
conceived by the Greek speaker/writer as somehow affecting the grammatical
subject. It's taken me a long time to work through these questions and I'm
not sure I've yet completely resolved the issues involved, but I do think
that speaking of verbs as "deponent" because they don't conform to our
simplistic conception of the way Greek voice works is avoiding the problem
of coming to a deeper understanding of the Greek verb.
-- 

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/



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