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The syntactic construction of two non-active Voices: Passive and middle1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 December 2011

ARTEMIS ALEXIADOU  and
EDIT DORON
ARTEMIS ALEXIADOU*
Affiliation:
Universität Stuttgart
EDIT DORON*
Affiliation:
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
*
Authors' addresses: (Alexiadou) Institut für Linguistik: Anglistik, Universität Stuttgart, Keplerstr. 17, 70174 Stuttgart, Germany[email protected]
(Doron) Linguistics Department, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 91905 Jerusalem, Israel[email protected]
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Abstract

The paper offers a theoretical characterization of the middle Voice as distinct from the passive Voice, and addresses the cross-linguistic morphological variation in realizing these two non-active Voices in different classes of languages, represented by Hebrew, Greek and English. The two non-active Voices are the morphological realization of two distinct syntactic Voice heads generating middle and passive clauses respectively. The former are cross-linguistically interpreted as (i) anticausative, (ii) reflexive (and reciprocal), (iii) dispositional middle, and (iv) medio-passive, which is distinct from passive. This variation in the interpretation of the middle Voice reflects different properties of the root rather than the application of four different lexical rules postulated by lexicalist theories.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 48 , Issue 1 , March 2012 , pp. 1 - 34
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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Footnotes

[1]

We are grateful to two anonymous JL referees and the editors for comments and suggestions. We also thank the audiences of the Thirtieth Annual Colloquium of GLOW, the University of Tromsø, April 2007, and the Colloquium of the English Department, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, May 2007. For their insightful comments we would like to thank in particular Anita Mittwoch, Malka Rappaport Hovav, and Florian Schäfer. Alexiadou's research was supported by a DFG grant to the project B6 ‘Underspecification in Voice systems and the syntax–morphology interface’ of the Collaborative Research Center 732 Incremental Specification in Context at the Universität Stuttgart. Doron's research was supported by the Israel Science Foundation grant #1157/10.

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