tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Apr 15 06:23:52 2002
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Re: middle voice
At 05:26 2002-04-15 -0400, [email protected] wrote:
>These examples all seem to illustrate the middle voice, where from "X kroinks
>Y" you get "Y kroinks".
The term that I've heard is "unaccusative verbs" -- i.e., verbs with a
subject, without and object, and where the subject is is an experiencer
or... theme? I forget the terms for those semantic roles, or theta roles,
or whatever the syntacticians call them these days.
Anyhow, examples of unaccusatives:
"the window broke"
"the pot cracked"
"the pen fell over"
"the patient fainted"
Some of these happen to correspond directly to a causative 2-term verb:
"I broke the window"
"I cracked the pot"
But sometimes a correspondence is less direct:
"I dropped the pen"
"I made the patient faint"
But one needn't say that one set comes from the other. I have heard the
term "middle voice" to refer to some bit of verbal morphology in Ancient
Greek, but I was never sure whether it was all-and-only for unaccusatives,
or only for unaccusatives that are derived from causatives, or
what. Anyhow, yes, these things are always a problem with a language that
tries to fit all verbal arguments into a subject/object dualism, as most
do, Klingon included.
--
Sean M. Burke http://www.spinn.net/~sburke/