Grammatical Voices

8 Key excerpts on "Grammatical Voices"

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  Voice and Mood (Essentials of Biblical Greek Grammar)

  A Linguistic Approach

  • David L. Mathewson, Porter, Stanley E., Stanley E. Porter(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Baker Academic

    (Publisher)

  2 Usually grammars include a very brief definition and discussion of voice, followed by (with few exceptions) a fairly standard list of labels that ostensibly classify the variety of voice usages in context. To illustrate the typical treatment of voice in Greek grammatical discussion, we will consider and summarize only a selection of the most recent grammars.

  Stanley E. Porter, in his Idioms of the Greek New Testament , defines voice as “a form-based semantic category used to describe the role that the grammatical subject of a clause plays in relation to an action.”3 Despite his rather informed treatment of Greek voice covering eleven pages, Porter admits that there is much more work to be done on voice in New Testament Greek. In his treatment of the specific voices, Porter states that for the active voice “the agent . . . is the grammatical subject of the verb.”4 In relationship to the other voices, it is the least semantically weighty. He discusses the active voice in relation to its use with verbs of perception, its use with verbs of motion, and its usage with the accusative case functioning adverbially. For the passive voice, the grammatical subject is the object or recipient of the verbal process, placing attention on the grammatical subject as the recipient of the action. Porter discusses the passive voice in relation to specified and unspecified agency, and the role of the accusative case objects. Finally, the middle voice, rather than carrying a reflexive meaning, expresses more direct participation, specific involvement, or some form of benefit of the grammatical subject.5 The middle is the most semantically weighty of the three voices. Rather than relying on the typical labels used by other grammars (see below), Porter discusses translating the middle voice, important usages in the New Testament, and the issue of deponency. On deponency, Porter is ambiguous about its value and concludes that the interpreter might be justified in finding middle meaning in all deponent verbs.6

  Richard A. Young devotes three and a half pages to voice.7 He defines voice as “a morphological feature that conveys the relation of the subject to the action of the verb.”8 In general, the active voice means the subject performs the action, the middle voice indicates the subject participates in the results of the action, and the passive voice means the subject is the recipient of the action. He then proposes the following labels (a mixture of semantic and functional notions) for their various usages in context: active—simple, causative, reflexive; middle—direct (reflexive, which is rare), indirect, permissive, reciprocal, deponent; passive—thematizing the subject, omitting the agent, emphasizing the agent, passive with a middle sense, deponent passive. Deponent verbs, according to Young, have middle or passive forms but are active in meaning.9

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  Diachronic Change in the English Passive

  • J. Toyota(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  This section will be the basis for later chapters. We first describe the voice continuum and relevant previous scholarship, and then apply it to the particular case of English. 5.5.1 What is voice continuum? Grammatical voice is mainly concerned with the relationship between participant roles of NP arguments of a verb and the grammatical relations borne by those same NPs. This relationship can be realised in various ways: the voice system in English involves the active and the passive, where the actor argument is encoded as subject and the undergoer argu- ment as object in the active, while in the passive, the actor is the oblique phrase and the undergoer is the subject. English does not have an overt marking system for the middle voice, but a similar relationship is often expressed by the use of reflexive pronouns. Those languages that have the middle (or reflexive) voice express both the actor and the under- goer identically as subject. In addition, there are a number of languages that use various other voice systems, such as applicative (actor as subject Functional Change and Voice Continuum 137 and undergoer as oblique phrase), circumstantial (actor as subject and indirect object as undergoer), etc. These various combinations are com- monly all treated under the label ‘grammatical voice’. This means that each voice does not exist independently: they are somehow related to each other, whether the relationship is syntactic, semantic or functional. This feature of grammatical voice has been called the voice continuum. Various scholars, some more explicitly than others, have noticed the con- tinuous nature of grammatical voice. For example, analysing the passive voice cross-linguistically, Siewierska (1984: 1) claims that ‘the analysis of the various constructions referred to in the literature as passive leads to the conclusion that there is not even one single property which all these constructions have in common’.

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  Typology of Verbal Categories

  Papers Presented to Vladimir Nedjalkov on the Occasion of his 70th Birthday

  • Leonid Kulikov, Heinz Vater, Leonid Kulikov, Heinz Vater(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  Voice Parameters Masayoshi Shibatani 1. Introduction While the currently prevailing views on voice consider it as a formal relation-changing phe-nomenon triggered by either a syntactic or morphological requirement (see Dixon 1979, Chomsky 1981, Perlmutter and Postal 1983, Mel'cuk 1993), this paper develops the traditional notion of voice, which considers it to be an expression of grammatical meanings. It is con-tended here that the opposition of the grammatical meanings in question holds the key to a better understanding of not only the forms of voice constructions and their synchronic distri-bution but also of their diachronic development. 2. Fundamental opposition and its prototypical manifestations The traditional view holds that voice represents the meaning relationship between the (referent of the) subject and the action denoted by the verb. For example, Kruisinga (1925: 167-168) states that: Voice is the name for a verbal form according as it primarily expresses the action or state with regard to its subject, which may be represented as acting ( active voice), undergo-ing ( passive voice), or affected by its own action ( reflexive [middle] voice). Whereas this and other traditional views see the opposition between active and passive in terms of whether the subject represents an actor, or agent, or an undergoer, or patient, consideration of the so-called impersonal passives would require a slightly broader view of the passive category if it were to embrace both personal and impersonal passives, both of which in fact stand in opposition to active forms. Although there are languages, e.g. Irish and Southern Paiute, which contain an impersonal passive construction distinct from a personal passive construction, a large number of languages make use of the same grammatical means in expressing these two types of passive construc-tion.

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  An Outline of Middle Voice in Syriac

  Evidences of a Linguistic Category

  • Margherita Farina(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Gorgias Press

    (Publisher)

  2 MIDDLE VOICE AND SOME LINGUISTIC CORRELATIONS 2.1 MIDDLE VOICE T h e importance of the category of middle voice was underlined in the previous chapter. Let us now give some preliminary definitions, in order to clarify the per-spective of this study. As regards voice, I refer to the following definition by Shibatani (1993), in the Introduction to the book: Voice is to be understood as a mechanism that selects a grammatically promi-nent syntactic constituent - subject - from the underlying semantic functions (case and thematic roles) of a clause. 54 Therefore, in this view, voice is a phenomenon related to the syntax-semantics interface and is correlated to what is considered to be the grammatical subject in a given language. T h e use of the term middle, in this context, derives from the ancient Greek grammatical tradition, in which it designated a class of verbs the meaning of which could be both active and passive, depending on the circumstances. A classic exam-ple is found in the chapter on verb (jtepi prjjiaxoc;) in the Techne Grammatike, controversially attributed to Dionysios Thrax: 54 Masayoshi Shibatani (ed.), Passive and Voice (Amsterdam - Philadelphia: Benjamins, 1988), 3. 55 The way this definition is phrased works essentially for nominative-accusative lan-guage type, to which Syriac belongs. A definition along the same lines, but focusing rather on the relational aspect of diathesis (in this case), is given in Retso, Diathesis, 622: Diathesis can be defined as the syntactic relationship between the verbal core of a sentence and its nominal constituents, i.e. the verbal predicate and the parts of speech directly relating to it, mainly subject and object. The relationship encompasses both semantic and morphosyntac-tic categories. 56 For the problem of the attribution of the Téchne, see Vincenzo Di Benedetto, Di-onisio Trace e la Techne a lui attribuita, Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa.

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  Meaning and Grammar

  Cross-Linguistic Perspectives

  • Michel Kefer, Johan van der Auwera, Michel Kefer, Johan van der Auwera(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Towards a typology of voice 1 Ineke Brus 1. Introduction Grammatical voice is a complex phenomenon. Syntactic structures that are considered to be voice options can differ widely in both form and function. Before attempting to set up a typology of any aspect of voice it is therefore vital to define even the most basic notions involved. Furthermore an effort should be made to disentangle, as far as possible, one (or more) of the aspects of the problem of voice from the rest. If this is not at least attempted from the outset, there is a danger that a typology of voice ends up as something as general and unmanageable as a typology of the transitive clause. By wanting too much too soon, in the end all that is left to conclude will be that languages are not uniform and do not lend themselves to uniform analyses (Siewierska 1984: 262). In the last few years studies have appeared on several aspects of grammatical voice, which show that there is much more to voice than our familiar Western European passives would have us suspect. Shibatani (1985) shows the diversity of passive constructions in meaning and structure. He defines a passive prototype in terms of both function and form so that the Western European construction is an example of a prototypical passive, with which constructions found in other languages can have more or fewer properties in common. Foley and Van Valin (1984) propose two functions for the passive, back-grounding and foregrounding, and claim that in some languages a passive construction has one of the two functions, and in others it can have both. Klaiman (1988) introduces the notion of conceptual status, and shows that some languages have voice options based on the parameters control and affected entity that are comprised within this notion. Trying to integrate insights from these studies, I will look at a number of constructions that are all connected with the notion of voice in one way or another.

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  Syntactic Analysis and Description

  A Constructional Approach

  • David Lockwood(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Continuum

    (Publisher)

  11 Voice and other forms of highlighting in the clause Active and passive voices In English and many, but not all, languages, there is a distinction between two (or sometimes more) ways of expressing some ideas which involves a grammatical category traditionally known as VOICE. Some simple examples of this distinction in English are shown in Table 11.1. In each set of examples, it can fairly be said that the second example, designated by the suffix a in its number, expresses the same essential idea as the one before it with the unsuffixed number. The example with the b suffix, on the other hand, differs from the other two in that it includes no indication of the doer of the action. An essential question that arises in regard to these examples is the extent to which the first and second members of each set of examples are synonymous. It has already been suggested above that they communicate the same essential idea. This means more specifically that the action, the relative time it was performed, the person performing it, and the other person on whom it was performed are all the same. For examples 1 and la, the action is slapping in the past, the performer is Susan and it is done to Tom. Still there is a meaning difference, because the active version in 1 is primarily about Susan and something she did, and the passive version in la (like the agentless passive in Ib) is primarily about Tom and something that happened to him. For a linguist, such a difference ought to be considered a real one. In the tradition of philosophers and logicians, however, such differences are considered less essential and relegated to pragmatics as opposed to a semantics dealing only with more essential distinctions. In this book, the study of linguistic meaning is seen as the subject of semology, and the semantic/pragmatic distinction is not considered important for the linguist, however important it may be for the logician or philosopher.

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  Aspects of the Theory of Morphology

  • Igor Mel'cuk, David Beck(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  They are illustrated below: first with an English expression built on the sample sentence John is shaving Alan (in some cases this expression is ungrammatical in Eng-lish); and second, with actual examples from languages that indeed have this voice. In the English literal glosses of the examples, I use the expression [“it”] as a conventional equivalent of an impersonal, or expletive, pronoun similar to Eng. IT in It is difficult to see , etc.; [“they”] represents abstract people, some-thing like Fr. ON or Ger. MAN . The marker of the voice grammeme under consid-eration is boldfaced; for each DSyntA, its SSynt-role and its morphological im-plementation is indicated. 4.2. Voice grammemes Voice grammemes are listed here in the following order: first, the grammemes obtainable by permutation only (Items 1–4); second, the grammemes obtainable by suppression only (Items 5–7); third, the grammemes obtainable by the com-bination of permutation with suppression (Items 8–9); and fourth, the gramme-mes obtainable by referential identification (Items 10–12). 1) ( ACTIVE ) : zero modification of the basic diathesis ( ( John is-shaving Alan ) ) X Y X Y I II I II (6) Latin Xenoph n + Ø agricultur + am lauda + ba + t + Ø SG.NOM agriculture SG.ACC praise IMPF 3SG ACT ( Xenophon [ I , Subj] praised [the] agriculture [ II , DirO] ) . 200 Chapter 3. Voice (7) Nepali Raj + le Ava + lay hirka + Ø + y + o ERG DAT hit ACT PAST 3SG.MASC ( Raj [ I , Subj] hit Ava [ II , DirO] ) . The Main Verb [= MV] agrees with the Subject (which is underscored) in person, number 2 , and gender 2 . Of course, it makes sense to speak of zero modification of the basic diathesis only if it is opposed to a non-zero modification. Therefore, an active is only possible with verbs that have at least one other voice such as a passive (this follows from the definition of an inflectional category, which cannot contain less than two gram-memes).

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  Advances in Morphology

  • Wolfgang U. Dressler, Martin Prinzhorn, John R. Rennison, Wolfgang U. Dressler, Martin Prinzhorn, John R. Rennison(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Grammatical cases, basic verbal construction, and voice in Maasai: Towards a better analysis of the concepts Igor Mel'cuk Introductory remarks This paper attempts a logical analysis of the concepts of grammatical case and grammatical voice as applied to the facts of Maasai, an Eastern Nilotic 1 language of East Africa. As is well known, case and voice are intimately connected: case is used to mark different Surface-Syntactic [= SSynt-] roles of Nominal Phrases [=NP], while the voice of the main verb determines which NP plays which SSynt-role. This justifies my con-sidering these two inflectional categories together. Moreover, a study of voice entails a study of the basic verbal construction of the language, i. e. what is called the Predicative Construction. That is, I have to discuss the relationship between the SSynt-Subject/the SSynt-Object, on the one hand, and case-marking, on the other. The structure of the paper is straightforward: it has three sections, each dedicated to one of my three targets: - Case in Maasai; - Basic verbal construction in Maasai; - Voice in Maasai. Moreover, there is an Appendix, in which I sketch a proposal for a calcu-lus of possible Grammatical Voices. Since I am by no means a specialist in Nilotic, all my data on Maasai came from published sources, mainly from Tucker - Mpaayei 1955. In a few cases I use data from other sources; this is always explicitly indicated. I am not presenting any new facts about Maasai nor do I offer any new explanations of some known facts. My main thrust is metalinguistic: using the facts of Maasai to improve our understanding of such concepts as nominative vs. accusative, ergative construction, and passive. What I am trying to do has a rather typological flavor: I would like to 132 Igor Mel'cuk make the terms current in Nilotic studies commensurate with what is known and used elsewhere. Thus I will analyze logically the terms nomi-native, passive, and a few others as well as the concepts underlying them.

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