[B-Greek] Voice: Distinguishing a Middle from a Passive

Kimmo Huovila kimmo.huovila at helsinki.fi
Sat Nov 10 14:31:17 EST 2007


On Saturday 10 November 2007, Carl Conrad wrote:
> Would you want to explain FOBEOMAI as a passive? There's a whole  
> category of emotional reactions/responses, e.g. AGALLIAOMAI,  
> hHDOMAI ... The question would have to be how we interpret the form:  
> is one acted upon and made to feel delight or pleasure?
> 

Verbs of emotion are often middle. Because FOBEOMAI tends to take the object 
of fear in the accusative, I would classify it as a middle. Likewise 
AGALLIAOMAI and hHDOMAI can be taken as middles. In my understanding, it is 
more common to have verbs of emotion in the middle than in the passive voice 
across languages. But this is based only on an (educated?) guess, not 
research.

So I would say middle, but the question is, do we always have to choose. Other 
cases may be even more problematic. The semantic overlap in many cases is 
important and may explain why the same form covers both voices and it can 
shed light on why middles often develop into passives (this is my 
understanding and it is shared by some other linguists, but I am not sure 
what research it is based on).

Another question is, does passive semantics require that there is an agent or 
something that acts on the subject, even if it is not mentioned. Why or why 
not?

For Greek, should we perhaps develop a theory of medio-passive semantics as a 
polysemous prototype category that covers both middles and passives (both 
being polysemous prototype categories) rather than feel the need to 
distinguish between the voices in all cases? After all, the Greeks didn't 
always choose to differentiate between the two, though sometimes the 
distinction is obvious enough.

A good exposition of polysemous prototype categories is found in John Taylor's 
Linguistic Categorization: Prototypes in Linguistic Theory.

Kimmo



More information about the B-Greek mailing list