[B-Greek] Why the Middle Voice can represent passive sense

Carl W.Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Tue Aug 21 07:48:24 EDT 2007


On Aug 16, 2007, at 9:10 PM, Kevin Riley wrote:
>
> Historically Greek - like the parent Indo-European - had a distinction
> between middle and active verbs.  The passive is, in Greek, a  
> developed use
> of the middle.  I am still puzzling over how a form that is subject  
> focused
> - the middle - came also to be used to represent the passive where the
> subject is not the focus, and need not appear at all.  I suspect if  
> we had a
> longer history of Greek we would see how it happened, but until we  
> discover
> pre-Homeric literature I guess it will remain conjecture.  It doesn't
> actually rate as the most strange development in grammatical  
> history.  Much
> stranger things have happened in other languages.  We should not  
> approach
> the history of language as if it were driven entirely by logic.

I've been meaning to respond to the above question -- or puzzlement  
-- for several days, but I've decided that I'll forgo a longer and  
fuller response at this point and try do deal directly with the  
question why one set of endings associated fundamentally with middle  
voice, could also be used to represent the passive. The simple answer  
is that the middle (or middle-passive) forms (and that's BOTH the MAI/ 
SAI/TAI, MHN/SO/TO endings of the present, imperfect, aorist, future,  
perfect, and pluperfect -- and a piddling number of non-periphrastic  
future perfects like KEKLHSOMAI (not in the GNT) -- AND the -QH-  
endings in the aorist and future) are all fundamentally marked for  
subject-affectedness, and this includes verbs and verb-forms where  
the subject is patient, undergoer, beneficiary or recipient). When  
the verb in question is really transitive, then the middle-passive  
form can have a passive sense because the patient of the process has  
become the subject of the verb, but in several other cases -- and  
especially in the case of intransitive verbs -- the middle-passive  
form simply indicates that the subject is BOTH  subject and patient  
(direct reflexive, e.g. XURATAI hO GORGIAS, "Gorgias shaves  
himself"), or BOTH subject and beneficiary or recipient (indirect  
reflexive, e.g. LUETAI hO hIPPEUS THN hIPPON, "The rider unties his  
mare", or BOTH subject and undergoer (intransitive, e.g. EGEIRETAI TO  
PAIS, "The child wakes up").

One of the major difficulties for English-speakers trying to  
understand the Greek middle-passive is that they tend to think of  
voice in terms of transitive verbs and an active-passive polarity,  
whereas the Greek voice-system is not so much concerned with  
transitivity as it is with verbs UNmarked for subject-affectedness  
and verbs MARKED for subject-affectedness.

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)




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