[B-Greek] Danker Festschrift: Deponency and -QH- forms

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Tue May 11 14:16:57 EDT 2004


In a message sent under the subject-header, "Summary of the Danker vol." a
week ago Sunday (March 2, 2004), Rod Decker summarized the contents of the
volume as a whole and noted some of the items he deemed of particular
interest. Now that my copy has arrived and I've begun to assimilate this
rich collection, I thought I would comment in particular on the single
issue discussed there that is of most immediate interest to me: a
lexicographer's perspective on the question of deponency. The key
conclusions I have found particularly significant and with both of which I
quite heartily concur are: (1) the notion of "deponency" should be dropped
altogether with respect to Greek grammar; (2) Greek verbs should preferably
be lemmatized in lexicons with aorist-stem headwords (I sense this is also
Randall Buth's considered opinion, probably of several others as well).

Particularly gratifying to me is that Taylor, so far as I know, has no
knowledge of my work or of that of Jonathan Pennington on voice and the
proposition that we have urged, that the notion of deponency be dropped
from our understanding of the Greek verb, yet for reasons of his own he has
reached very much the same conclusion. So here's a brief summary, with
intermingled remarks of my own about what I consider particularly helpful
in Taylor's discussion:

Bernard A. Taylor, "Deponency and Greek Lexicography" in _Biblical Greek
Language and Lexicography: Essays in Honor of Frederick W. Danker_, ed.
Taylor, Lee, Burton, Whitaker, Eerdmans, 2004, pp. 167-176.

Taylor asks how lemmata for verbs in lexicon should represent standard
features of voice in Greek verbs? This is a broader question emerging from
decisions made by lexicographer regarding (a) what function (M or P) to
assign to MP verb-forms in those tenses where the form could signify either
voice; (b) what lemma of the verb should serve as the headword for any
verb's lexical definition. If one cites with the -MAI form a verb that has
no active form in the relevant database, does that mean we're dealing with
a "deponewnt" verb?

Taylor says that he has been led to rethink the issue of deponency as it
relates to Greek by two reflections: (1) his work in LXX lexicography has
sensitized him to the nature of the middle voice; (2) he has come to
recognize that the term which may be justified when applied to the Latin
verb is NOT applicable to the Greek verb. As others, including Jonathan
Pennington and myself, have noted, the meaning assigned the word "deponent"
derives from its etymology in the active participle of the Latin verb
DEPONO, which means  "lay aside"--but what is "laid aside"? The two common
answers are: (1) active-voice form is laid aside; (2) middle-passive
meaning is laid aside (because the meaning is really active).

There is in fact no Greek equivalent word for "deponent verb"; the term has
been borrowed from Latin grammar and applied--or misapplied--to the grammar
of the Greek verb. The term "Middle" for middle voice, however, is attested
in Greek grammarians and is based upon the observation that there are three
voices in Greek. Dionysius Thrax (2nd c. BCE in Grammaticus 638.8) says of
these forms: EISI TREIS, ENERGEIA, PAQOS, MESOTHS ('there are three,
activity, passivity, medial character'); Apollonius Dyscolus (2nd c. CE in
De Syntaxi, 210.19, 226.10) speaks of DIAQESIS ('dispositions') as
PAQHTIKH, MESH ('passive,' 'middle.')

Taylor notes also that a high measure of consistency in Latin between stems
of different tense-systems with recognizable roots is lacking in Greek,
where tense-stems do not clearly relate to the form of root seen in the
present tense. In Greek the aorist stem is generally prior to the present
stem which is a modification of the aorist stem. For "deponent" verbs,
aorist stem is preferable because one can distinguish Middle from Passive
forms, as evident in Smyth's distinction between "middle deponents" with
aorists in -MHN and "passive deponents" with aorists in -QHN.

The definition of "deponent verbs" is meaningless, Taylor argues, because
the so-called "deponent" verbs "lay aside" neither form nor meaning. We
should drop the term "deponency" because (a) Greeks themselves didn't use
it; (b) it masks the meaning of the voices: the middle voice needs to be
understood as such.

This second point is one that I realized early on in my own study of voice
in the Greek verb: the middle voice is not just a halfway house between the
active and passive but a distinct category of relationship of the
grammatical subject to the action or experience in which he/she is
involved. My observation that this was true convinced me of what I later
came to find constated in Suzanne Kemmer's definitive book on the middle
voice and in Neva Miller's essay entitled "A New Theory of Deponents"
(Appendix 2 of the Fribergs' _Analytical Lexicon of the Greek New
Testament_): there are numerous verbs that fall naturally into whatever
mechanics a language may have to distinguish the middle idea.

The second of my chief concerns in my own work on Greek voice is the
slowly-emerging but now solid conviction that the -QH- morphoparadigms in
Greek were NEVER distinctly or exclusively passive in any semantic sense
but rather were fundamentally intransitive aorist forms with active endings
functioning as aorists for verbs with presents in -MAI (For example, the
verb PLAGCQH in the second line of the Odyssey speaks of Odysseus as a man
who "wandered"; that verb has as its present PLAZOMAI and it can in no way
be termed a "deponent."). So it was gratifying to me to note that Taylor
also has recognized the ambivalence of the -QH- morphoparadigms; he says:

"Passive deponents" are especially troublesome: "As has been noted, there
is a close relationship between the middle and the passive in Greek, both
in those tenses where the two are not distinguished and in those where they
are. Whether it was because an inherent fluidity was sensed between the two
voices, or the reflexive idea was seen to be present in both, in these
instances morphological form does not dictate syntactical function.
Consequently the passive morpheme -QH- did not uniformly signal that the
subject of the verb was invariably the receiver of the action."

In conclusion, Taylor's dismissal of "deponency" is succinct and eloquent:
"For Greek, then, what needs to be laid aside is the notion of deponency."
I find that this mirrors nicely what A.T. Robertson said what seems like
ages ago: "Moulton is certainly right in saying that the term [deponent]
should be applied to all three voices if to any. The truth is that it
should not be used at all ." (_A Grammar of the Greek New Testament_, 1934,
p. 332)

With respect to indicating a verb's headword in a lexicon by its
voice-form, Taylor concludes: "If a verb occurs regularly in the active or
passive, then that is indicated by use of a present active lexical
form/headword; and if not, then the middle/passive form is used for verbs
occurring in the middle. This will serve to indicate whether the voice is
active or middle."

Taylor notes two other points regarding Greek lexicography in his conclusion:
(1) he would welcome a lexicon built around the aorist tense rather than
the present tense; (2) LXX lexicography should be opened up to a wider body
of literature comparable to the broader Hellenistic database of BDAG.
-- 

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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