Feedback on Greek Voice Tagging and Rationale
Posted: April 14th, 2014, 2:09 pm
I want to pose three questions bearing on our understanding of ancient Greek voice and the terms used to indicate what I call “morphoparadigms” – the paradigm groups of forms that are distinguished by the traditional active, middle-passive, and passive voice markers. By way of preface, here’s a bit about my work over the years on these questions.
Veteran B-Greekers know that Greek verbal voice has been my hobbyhorse for a decade and a half; I have regularly shared – ad nauseam -- discoveries and concerns (my first foray into the matter was in May of 1997: http://www.ibiblio.org/bgreek/archives/ ... 00491.html I am fundamentally a teacher, not a scholar. I have a solid grounding in traditional grammatical lore, but no grounding at all in Linguistics; I tend to be rather skeptical of both, perhaps overly so. After years of observing, comparing, reading and thinking about voice forms and usage, I am convinced that middle and passive morphology both are distinctly marked for subject-affectedness, while active morphology is not so marked. I’m also convinced that in later Greek aorist θη forms gradually supplanted older aorist –μην/σο/το forms (ἀπεκρίνατο became ἀπεκρίθη, ἐγένετο became ἐγενήθη) and I believe this change was evidently taking place as the text of the GNT was emerging. I urge “laying aside” the “deponency” doctrine which holds that verbs wanting active-voice forms in the present-indicative are somehow defective, that they may once have had active forms but have “laid them aside” (that’s what “deponent” means). I’ve been pleased to find my observations and hypothesizing confirmed in the work of Suzanne Kemmer, Rutger Allan, and others. I confess that I still do not believe that all of the observed facts fall readily into a wholly satisfying framework, but I believe it is time to drop the traditional pedagogical account of Greek voice and the notion of “deponent” verbs as a sort of misfits in an otherwise intelligible framework of morphoparadigms bearing discernible active, middle, and passive semantic force.
I now seek feedback regarding a brief rationale that I have written for the Friberg Analytical Greek New Testament (AGNT). AGNT is one of several parsing tools available for students, pastors and others providing basic details of every inflected word in the GNT. I have volunteered for some time as a consultant to the AGNT project, while continuing to oppose tagging GNT middle-voice verbs as deponents. Below are two downloadable documents; the first is the current rationale for voice tagging in AGNT; the second is my own alternative rationale for dropping the notion of “deponency” and adopting a simpler tagging of morphoparadigms.
I argue that the morphoparadigms for voice should be tagged by using the characters A, M, and P without any implication of semantic force of verb-endings including μαι/σαι/ται κτλ. or θη. I maintain that middle-passive and passive morphoparadigms are both marked for subject-affectedness, and that the “active” morphoparadigm is employed for semantically active, intransitive, and even some passive verbs, but is unmarked for subject-affectedness, and I endeavor to show how centuries of linguistic change have impacted a Greek voice system that evidently did not trouble native users but tends to confound learners.
Here are the original account (from current print and digital editions of AGNT) and the alternative account that I have prepared:
Question 1: Is my own rationale (ALTERNATIVE AGNT 53 ON VOICE) for tagging Greek verbs for voice as A, M, P clear/intelligible and persuasive? What in particular needs clarification? How might it be improved without expanding it considerably?
Question 2: Is the ORIGINAL AGNT 5.3 ON VOICE still intelligible and persuasive? Does it make a clear and convincing case for classifying verb forms as “deponents”? Can the traditional notion of deponent verbs be defended in this day and age?
Question 3: Finally, how should we best tag Greek verb forms for voice? I would prefer to designate both “middle-passive” and “passive” morphoparadigms with the Greek phrase ἑαυτικὴ διάθεσις and the “active” morphoparadigms with the Greek phrase κοινὴ διάθεσις; that, I think, would be too radical a change for those who learned Greek voice the old-fashioned way; my “halfway-house” alternative – employing “A” for “active” morphoparadigms, “MP1” for “middle-passive” forms in μαι/σαι/ται κτλ. and “MP2” for “passive” forms in θη (since verbs containing θη are also ambivalent with regard to voice) may likewise seem too radical. Another suggestion is using α, β, and γ to designate the three morphological paradigms, thereby freeing them all from any name implying a semantic force to be associated with the morphology. What do you think?
Veteran B-Greekers know that Greek verbal voice has been my hobbyhorse for a decade and a half; I have regularly shared – ad nauseam -- discoveries and concerns (my first foray into the matter was in May of 1997: http://www.ibiblio.org/bgreek/archives/ ... 00491.html I am fundamentally a teacher, not a scholar. I have a solid grounding in traditional grammatical lore, but no grounding at all in Linguistics; I tend to be rather skeptical of both, perhaps overly so. After years of observing, comparing, reading and thinking about voice forms and usage, I am convinced that middle and passive morphology both are distinctly marked for subject-affectedness, while active morphology is not so marked. I’m also convinced that in later Greek aorist θη forms gradually supplanted older aorist –μην/σο/το forms (ἀπεκρίνατο became ἀπεκρίθη, ἐγένετο became ἐγενήθη) and I believe this change was evidently taking place as the text of the GNT was emerging. I urge “laying aside” the “deponency” doctrine which holds that verbs wanting active-voice forms in the present-indicative are somehow defective, that they may once have had active forms but have “laid them aside” (that’s what “deponent” means). I’ve been pleased to find my observations and hypothesizing confirmed in the work of Suzanne Kemmer, Rutger Allan, and others. I confess that I still do not believe that all of the observed facts fall readily into a wholly satisfying framework, but I believe it is time to drop the traditional pedagogical account of Greek voice and the notion of “deponent” verbs as a sort of misfits in an otherwise intelligible framework of morphoparadigms bearing discernible active, middle, and passive semantic force.
I now seek feedback regarding a brief rationale that I have written for the Friberg Analytical Greek New Testament (AGNT). AGNT is one of several parsing tools available for students, pastors and others providing basic details of every inflected word in the GNT. I have volunteered for some time as a consultant to the AGNT project, while continuing to oppose tagging GNT middle-voice verbs as deponents. Below are two downloadable documents; the first is the current rationale for voice tagging in AGNT; the second is my own alternative rationale for dropping the notion of “deponency” and adopting a simpler tagging of morphoparadigms.
I argue that the morphoparadigms for voice should be tagged by using the characters A, M, and P without any implication of semantic force of verb-endings including μαι/σαι/ται κτλ. or θη. I maintain that middle-passive and passive morphoparadigms are both marked for subject-affectedness, and that the “active” morphoparadigm is employed for semantically active, intransitive, and even some passive verbs, but is unmarked for subject-affectedness, and I endeavor to show how centuries of linguistic change have impacted a Greek voice system that evidently did not trouble native users but tends to confound learners.
Here are the original account (from current print and digital editions of AGNT) and the alternative account that I have prepared:
Question 1: Is my own rationale (ALTERNATIVE AGNT 53 ON VOICE) for tagging Greek verbs for voice as A, M, P clear/intelligible and persuasive? What in particular needs clarification? How might it be improved without expanding it considerably?
Question 2: Is the ORIGINAL AGNT 5.3 ON VOICE still intelligible and persuasive? Does it make a clear and convincing case for classifying verb forms as “deponents”? Can the traditional notion of deponent verbs be defended in this day and age?
Question 3: Finally, how should we best tag Greek verb forms for voice? I would prefer to designate both “middle-passive” and “passive” morphoparadigms with the Greek phrase ἑαυτικὴ διάθεσις and the “active” morphoparadigms with the Greek phrase κοινὴ διάθεσις; that, I think, would be too radical a change for those who learned Greek voice the old-fashioned way; my “halfway-house” alternative – employing “A” for “active” morphoparadigms, “MP1” for “middle-passive” forms in μαι/σαι/ται κτλ. and “MP2” for “passive” forms in θη (since verbs containing θη are also ambivalent with regard to voice) may likewise seem too radical. Another suggestion is using α, β, and γ to designate the three morphological paradigms, thereby freeing them all from any name implying a semantic force to be associated with the morphology. What do you think?