Part 3 of our read-through of of Rachel Aubrey’s thesis on the Greek middle. Part 1., and Part 2. Numbers in brackets are page references.

Chapter 2 of Aubrey’s thesis looks at the Greek middle in the context of other languages and their voice systems. How does the Greek middle, and the Greek voice system, ‘fit’ in comparison to other languages and their voices systems (23) rather than the traditional approach which begins from an active-passive contrast and goes from there.

Aubrey begins by distinguishing derived and basic voice systems. English is a derived system, because it is traced from a source, Greek is a basic system because it is not. To put it more simply, the passive in English takes the active structure and “remaps the participants” (25). Greek middles do not work like that – they do not presume the priority of the active and then go about remapping the participants in the event. Other languages are similarly basic or derived, and not all exhibit the same sets of systems (cf. anti-passives, inverse systems, etc. (24)).

Let me give an example (different to Aubrey’s) of that remapping

• Michael wrote (b) the tweets.
• The tweets were written (a) by Michael.

Here the agent (a) is remapped (demoted) to an optional oblique phrase, while the patient (b) is promoted to the subject of the verb. A consequence of having a derived system like this, Aubrey says, is that they can be no passive-only verbs – passives only arise by being derived from actives (26). Secondly, only transitive clauses (i.e. with direct objects) can be passivized. Intransitives cannot.

Thirdly, Aubrey points out that voice alternations in derived systems are “expected to be semantically neutral” (26) that is, switching patient from object to subject does not normally change the meaning of the verb, only the alignment of the participants.

Well, what about a basic middle system? Aubrey’s work here appears to draw primarily on Klaiman and Shibatani. So, in contrast, middles are not derived from their active counterparts – there is no ‘mesofication’ process that turns an active into a middle clause. The agent is still the subject, the patient remains the object. The alternation between active and middle rests in a semantic alternation (27).

Because (θ)η type middles are not ‘passive’, they overlap with -μαι type middles, and they are not derived from active prototypes. Because -μαι and (θ)η type middles are basic and not derived, one doesn’t need to explain middle-only and passive-only verbs. There is no ‘deponency’ problem.

Related to this, because the active-middle contrast is not about syntactic transitivity (e.g. rearranging agent/patient subject/object positions), it means that the middle voice is not restricted t a single set of transitivity. Hence, you find middles with one, and two, arguments. This is an important difference from the derived system, where going from active to passive involves losing an argument:

Michael (1) wrote the tweets (2)

The tweets (1) were written.

In the derived system, one cannot require a second argument. But middle systems can appear as transitive or intransitive, with 1 or 2 arguments [28].

Thirdly, in contrast to the derived system were a voice alternation is semantically neutral, in a basic system, they are not – shifting between active and middle is a semantic shift, not merely a syntactical rearrangement (30).

Aubrey concludes this subsection, “the descriptive problems in the Greek middle are due more to a misguided use of a derived passive system than to Greek voice operating differently than typologically expected in a basic middle system.” (31) Or, in simple terms, your problem all along was that you kept trying to fit Greek middles into an active<>passive mould, but when you look at Greek middles in light of other active<>middle voice languages, it’s not weird at all.

Carrying on with our read-through of Rachel Aubrey’s thesis on the Greek middle. Part 1 here. Numbers in brackets are page references.

The rest of chapter 1 provides an overview of approaches to the middle. Aubrey commences this by highlighting two issues – (i) the semantic basis of the middle is unclear, (ii) its “formal expression is uncertain” (5). Traditionally (6) voice is treated “as a relationship between subject and verb” (6).

Active: the subject does the action as agent.

Passive: the subject suffers the action, as patient.

Middle: ???

The middle shows such a diversity of semantic relationships that it is difficult to summarise it. It is also often treated as equivalent to a reflexive. However that tends to belie an important distinction – the middle typically occurs with things that are customarily done by people on themselves (hence the ‘bodily grooming’ verbs), the reflexive structure (e.g. ἑαυτόν) involves both active and middle verbs, that are not customarily done to oneself. Other categories of middle-type verbs fit even less well in the ‘reflexive’ notion (9). Aubrey goes on to work through a number of other different categories or types of action generally found or treated as middle, which traditional schemes have tried to abstract as a single overall ‘middleness’ : “self-interest, personal involvement, participation, special focus, or subject-affectedness” (10). She notes that the problem with all these is that they are so abstracted that they fail to capture the variety of middle functions, as well as how the middle relates to voice alternations.

The second challenge has to do with “the formal expression of the middle”, especially morphosyntax. For example, the existence of active-only verbs that lack middle-passive forms, as well as middle-only verbs that lack active forms. Similarly, the existence of the -(θ)η- middle-passive perfectives. Traditionally, this means that imperfective (‘present’, ‘imperfect’) forms are presented as an opposition between active and middle-passive, and perfective (‘aorist’, ‘future’) as a tripartive alternation between active, middle, passive. But perfective -θη- often does not conform to expectations that it is properly passive semantically (13).

Aubrey’s interest is bringing the analysis around to transitivity. These two things (voice, transitivity) have not traditionally been treated together, voice being a relation of subject and verb, transitivity of verb and object. Voice, Aubrey says, “entails distinctions in process, regarding how an event transpires” (14). By considering event structure – how an event is understood to unfold, voice distinctions allow us to view, and portray, an event unfolding in different ways.

In particular, a semantic approach allows us to consider three parameters (drawing on Shibatani):

• how events unfold in the flow of energy: how they begin, progress, and end
• how participants are related within event development
• how their involvement affects the relative salience of participants (15)

What does that mean? In short, we consider where, how and whom events start, and end. We consider the roles that various participants take in the event. The middle re-orients out understanding and placement of the subject, in a way that differs from the active.

Aubrey’s approach to transitivity more generally, then, treats it as a continuum, from a prototypical transitive event “where a volitional agent purposely acts on a distinct patient, causing a physical change of state/location in the patient” (18). The middle is a voice alternation that departs from that presentation. It may depart from it in various ways though. Generally though, the origin and endpoint role of a middle event is filled by the same participant (19).

Aubrey summarises, or subsumes, the three parameters (above) into two motivations for how we portray events (and thus choose to use or not use middle forms): energy flow (a and b above), and focus of attention (c above) (20). This also deals with, or subsumes, ‘subject-affectedness’, by also treating a participant as more or less affected by the event, and their nature as an endpoint.

Thus Aubrey’s treatment is to view “the middle as a multifunctional category grounded in human cognition” and this “allos us to engage the construal process and the nature of event categorization” (21).

In our next post, we’ll look at chapter 2, which considers the Greek middle into a cross-linguistic typology context.

This is a series of posts blogging my way through the very recent MA thesis of Rachel Aubrey on ‘HELLENISTIC GREEK MIDDLE VOICE: SEMANTIC EVENT STRUCTURE AND VOICE TYPOLOGY’ available here. I’m not a linguist, but I do my best to help non-linguists understand linguistic content. In this post I cover only the very first introductory section.

Aubrey’s introduction neatly highlights the problematic approaches to the middle voice in Greek (the thesis focuses on Hellenistic Greek, understandably, and I will shorten this to ‘Greek’ throughout except where other periodisations are required). Primarily, the middle voice is ‘multifunctional’ (1) and so resists attempts at ‘simple generalizations’ (1). In particular, standard approaches in traditional NT Greek grammars are rooted in a classical (and grammarian) tradition (not a linguistic one). Two problems in particular stand out: portraying the middle in terms of an active-passive dichotomy, and focusing on morphosyntax as a descriptive (and even diagnostic) framework.

The consequences of such an approach, Aubrey writes, are a neglect of a typological approach; an oversimplification of middle semantics, either by (a) discretely compartmentalising usages, or (b) too simplistic generalisations). The outcome of these consequences, in turn, is a dual failure of NT Greek grammars in both typology and paradigm.

Aubrey’s approach (2) is (a) typological, (b) contrasts active-middle counterparts, (c) uses ‘semantic transitivity’ as a lens to understanding.

What’s semantic transitivity? At least so far as I understand it, the analysis is going to consider transitivity as a ‘scale’, rather than the binary that English oriented grammar often works with (transitive vs intransitive), so that we are considering transitivity as a spectrum of ‘action directed upon an entity’. In particular, we are interested in transitivity as encoded in the meaning of verbs, and the presentation of event types, rather than the morphosyntax per se.

Aubrey then moves on in the introduction to outline the thesis structure itself. That is, a review of current approach to the Greek middle (chapter 1), language typological considerations (chapter 2), a diachronic perspective (chapter 3), before presenting her own unified approach (chapter 4).

She also highlights in the introduction some of the benefits of this work. In particular, a much better framework for putting to rest (6 foot under), the notion of deponency, but also providing a language-specific account which handles the idiosyncrasies of the middle voice, in a way that reflects languages with middle voices, not the framework of an active-passive voice language.

Personally, I’m really looking forward to reading this thesis in depth. Having read both Kemmer and Allen’s work on the middle voice, and having heard enough hints about Aubrey’s thesis, I strongly expect this to be the newest and hottest treatment of the middle voice in Greek, and if widely read, set to reshape the way we understand, and teach, voice in (Hellenistic, at least), Greek.

(You can find some of my previous posts and treatment of the middle voice here, as well as my read through of Michael Aubrey’s thesis on the Greek perfect form here.)