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If I throw a ball at someone; that is active. If someone throws a ball at me - and it hits me in the face; that is passive.

But if someone throws a ball at me, and I catch it; that is 'responsive'. Should there not be, then, a 'responsive' voice?

This is not theoretical. I am writing an article about 'deponent' Greek verbs which, it is argued, are passive in form, but active in meaning. I do not agree and I believe that they are 'responsive' in meaning.

But, if so, then it must be true in all languages, English included, that there is a voice which indicates a response to someone else's active-ness.

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Edited after Answers

My problem, I think, is a matter of relativity.

In the example above (I throw, I am hit, I catch) I am looking at everything from my own point of view.

But language construction observes all the events objectively.

Nigel threw. John threw and hit Nigel. John threw and Nigel caught.

Nigel J
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    Related Linguistics SE question: What is the difference between mediopassive VP's and anti-causative VP's? Categorizing verbs according to their meaning is tricky and there are likely to be many possible classifications, much more than just two or three – herisson Oct 07 '17 at 23:39
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    You may have pointed out a semantic nuance, but I can't tell if there is a syntactic phenomenon that corresponds. Your example "I catch it' sounds like it fits the active voice syntax – Mitch Oct 07 '17 at 23:41
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    See e.g. the Wikipedia article on thematic relation for an idea of the different kinds of relationships verbs can express. The term "active" in "active voice" should not be interpreted as implying "active-ness" in the colloquial sense. – herisson Oct 07 '17 at 23:43
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    Why must something which is true in Greek be true in all languages? For example, Greek has masculine, feminine, and neuter nouns. English doesn't. – Peter Shor Oct 08 '17 at 00:59
  • @PeterShor I think that genderification is a mechanical matter of language. Responsiveness, expressed in grammatical construction, would be a matter of semantics. It's the concept that I am striving after. – Nigel J Oct 08 '17 at 01:07
  • English has much reduced grammar, especially compared to ancient Greek. Try finding the equivalent of the medium :-) – Tom Oct 08 '17 at 09:53
  • @NigelJ If you don't like genderification as an example, consider languages (e.g. Arabic) which have singular, dual (exactly two) and plural (more than two) forms of nouns and verbs. – alephzero Oct 08 '17 at 10:55
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    Your "responsive" case involves two separate verbs, and each is in the active voice (someone threw a ball, and you caught a ball). The connection between the two isn't a question of grammar. – chepner Oct 08 '17 at 15:34
  • @Tom By 'medium' do you mean the middle voice? We don't technically have that, but I could come up with an example that conveys the same meaning. Try 'wash': "Bob washed the car" is active, "The car was washed" is passive, but "Bob washed" (implying "Bob washed himself") corresponds very closely to the meaning of the Middle Voice in Greek if I'm not mistaken! – Quack E. Duck Jul 07 '23 at 04:56
  • Oh, I see herisson has already addressed this point in the second paragraph of the accepted answer. Still though, the example with 'wash' shows it doesn't always have to be an intransitive construction since you can say "Bob washed himself" where 'himself' is the direct object of the (middle voice?) 'washed' – Quack E. Duck Jul 07 '23 at 05:05
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    @QuackE.Duck yes, but grammatically that's just an active form where you derive from context that the subject and object are the same. In greek that would be a differen suffix. Which means, for example if you get an incomplete message in English you can't be sure if Bob washed himself or someone/something else. In Greek you would be sure as soon as you see the word "wash". – Tom Jul 07 '23 at 07:07
  • @Tom That's true - context and word order are much more important and there are a lot fewer distinct forms in English. After all, Greek is the language that has 24 ways of saying "the" (4 * 2 * 3 different forms for the definite article) :D – Quack E. Duck Jul 07 '23 at 17:32
  • @QuackE.Duck The 24 'different' ways are simply that Greek is an inflected language and demonstrates grammatical gender and number when the article (or a noun or a participle or an adjective) is used. The article is a single word, inflected. Not many forms. – Nigel J Jul 07 '23 at 17:45
  • @Tom You're right that I was using the word 'forms' imprecisely. But the point still stands: sometimes you can infer the (implicit and omitted) subject of the sentence just by the inflection of the definite article. "'oi en tw stratopedw" I believe could be used to mean "the soldiers in the camp" all on its own, even though the noun has been left out, while "ta en tw stratopedw" would be "the things in the camp." I just meant to contrast this with how in English, the definite article on its own doesn't convey any of this extra information, because it isn't declined. – Quack E. Duck Jul 07 '23 at 18:22
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    @QuackE.Duck Yes, I understand. Quite right. – Nigel J Jul 07 '23 at 19:27

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If I throw a ball at someone; that is active.

Correct. Throw a ball is an active predicate.

If someone throws a ball at me - and it hits me in the face; that is passive.

Incorrect. Throw a ball is an active predicate (see above), and so is hit me in the face.

Active and Passive are grammatical terms in English that describe constructions; they don't have to do with what happens to the speaker, or with emotions.

A Passive construction is one in which a transitive verb appears with its semantic object as its grammatical subject, in the form of a past participle preceded by a form of be, like

  • She was hit in the face by a tomato.

Any predicate that does not meet these criteria is (syntactically) active, not passive. And those are the only Voice-like constructions in English (they're not voices because they're not inflections like Latin voices).

As for deponent Greek verbs, unless you're a native speaker, you have no data on what they "mean". But go right ahead anyway.

John Lawler
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    Passives don't always have to use be. You could say for instance that She got hit in the face by a tomato. Geoffrey Pullum at Language log has a good lengthy explanation of the passive voice that goes into more detail on this point.http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922 – bdsl Oct 08 '17 at 10:24
  • Who says that voice has to be inflection? Latin voice is expressed through inflection in the present, but through periphrasis in the perfect, just like English—with the exact same basic structure, even: be + passive participle. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Oct 08 '17 at 11:05
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    You're right that the constructions given are active. However, there's no call to say English doesn't have a passive voice. Just because it's analytic rather than synthetic doesn't mean it doesn't exist. – SirTechSpec Oct 08 '17 at 13:31
  • English has a passive construction. It has no active construction; only the absence of a passive construction (which can use get, too, since get is the inchoative of be). There are thousands of constructions in English; it is pointless to give separate names to their absence as well as their presence. Oh, and calling it a "voice" makes it linguistic terminology, and linguistic terminology in English grammar and usage does not use active in this way (which is a good thing, because it's already used in several other ways as well; that's why I said syntactically active above). – John Lawler Oct 08 '17 at 14:19
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    "There are thousands of constructions in English; it is pointless to give separate names to their absence as well as their presence." That seems too strong a statement: for instance, it's sometimes useful to be able to talk about positive and negative statements, rather than negative statements and "statements containing no negative". – psmears Oct 08 '17 at 21:29
  • All sorts of noun compounds with all sorts of meanings can be made up by people in the same speech community. This is especially true of specialist communities like linguists. Inside the group, we speak blithely of TAM (Tense-Aspect-Modality) markers, but we know we're speaking metaphorically. Outside the group, the terms have to be used conservatively, lest outgroup members draw the wrong conclusions. And start pointless arguments. – John Lawler Oct 09 '17 at 03:02
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I think it would be best to avoid trying to talk about meaning in terms of voice at all. It's confusing, like talking about time reference in terms of "tense", because people often use terms like "voice" and "tense" to refer to purely morphological categories. I would advise only using the term "voice" to talk about the morphological form of verbs, since that seems easier to determine. There are so many different types of thematic relations that a complete classification of verbs according to their meanings would need much more than two or three categories.

English only distinguishes two forms that I am aware of for voice: active and passive. Some verbs have an intransitive construction that is sometimes called "middle voice" or "mediopassive" due to its meaning, although it takes the form of the active voice: things like "the water froze" (vs "the cold of the night froze the water") and "the water boiled". While these words are maybe valid as technical terminology with defined meanings as applied to English, I don't think it is particularly wise to use this terminology to associate the English expressions with Greek expressions, or with other English verbs with somewhat similar meanings like "catch". My impression is that the thing called "middle voice" in Greek is not really the same as the thing that some people call "middle voice" in English.

When people say that Greek deponent verbs are "active in meaning", I hope the main point they're trying to make is that they cannot be converted into an active-voice equivalent. I don't speak Greek of any kind, but that is what I gather from the Wikipedia article Ancient Greek verbs. The sources I have looked at also indicate that Greek distinguishes between a passive and middle voice in the inflection of the aorist (although not in the present, imperfect, or perfect), and some deponent verbs have passive-voice aorist forms while others have middle-voice aorist forms; so it seems like the description of deponent verbs as "passive in form" is a bit of a simplification (although passive-form deponents are apparently more common than middle-voice deponents).

A less charitable interpretation that I've seen in some of the sources referenced below is that "active in meaning" is simply based on the fact that Greek deponent verbs are often translated into English using English active-voice verbs—this would be an erroneous basis for a description of Greek grammar, since a description of a term used in Greek grammar should not be defined based on English categories of voice.

Anyway, I agree with you that this common definition of "deponent" seems like sloppy, unnecessary wording.

So, I would recommend saying something like

Although some describe Greek deponent verbs as 'active in meaning', I do not agree with this description. The distinction between deponent verbs and non-deponent verbs is simply that

  • deponent verbs have no active-voice forms. [optionally specify what time period or corpus you are talking about here e.g. a number of sources I found talking about Biblical Greek specify "no active-voice form found in the Greek New Testament"]

  • non-deponent verbs have active-voice forms.

The meaning of a deponent verb, like the meaning of any verb, depends on the specific word.

This description also seems in line with some resources I found online talking about Greek deponent verbs:

herisson
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  • Many thanks. Much appreciated. Upvoted as the answer. – Nigel J Oct 08 '17 at 02:18
  • As I understand it, the insistence on Greek having deponent verbs is that Latin has them and some demand that Greek can only be understood through Latin. – Nigel J Oct 08 '17 at 07:01
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    @NigelJ Latin doesn’t really have deponent verbs any more than Greek does. They basically function the same way. English has completely lost all traces of a morphological mediopassive, but even those Germanic languages that have morphological mediopassives, like the Scandinavian languages, have ‘deponent’ verbs as well, which usually developed from either reciprocative or impersonal constructions; e.g., Danish de slås ‘they fight’ (lit. ‘they hit-each-other’, reciprocative) or jeg synes ‘I think/opine’ (from earlier mig synes ‘meseems’—compare ‘methinks’ in English). – Janus Bahs Jacquet Oct 08 '17 at 11:07
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    … Those last two are in opposition to de slår ‘they hit’ (active) and jeg syner ‘I inspect [a car, for vehicle safety inspection]’ or ‘I appear [on the horizon, etc.]’ (the active voice having been narrowed down in meaning). The once-mediopassive forms are still conjugated in the mediopassive, but their meaning is no longer mediopassive, and children especially tend to conjugate them as regular, active verbs (creating past tense forms like slåssede ‘fought’ instead of standard sloges). – Janus Bahs Jacquet Oct 08 '17 at 11:12
  • @JanusBahsJacquet Your comment about 'reciprocative' and 'impersonal' is very helpful. It is exactly that mode of expression which I am studying in the Greek. Very helpful. Thank you. – Nigel J Oct 08 '17 at 13:38
  • @JanusBahsJacquet I have seen this perspective (that 'deponent' isn't a really meaningful category and that it could be better explained by a missing active voice). It seems very convincing, but what I don't understand is how those with obviously active meanings and with active-voice forms alongside passive-looking forms fit in. Like transitive 'sequi' (follow): "Leo bovem sequitur" (The lion follows the ox) looks passive but is active; "Leo bovem sequens..." (The lion following the ox...) looks active and is; "Leo cogitat bovis sequendus est" (The lion thinks the ox should be followed) --> – Quack E. Duck Jul 07 '23 at 05:30
  • (continued) looks and is passive. I haven't found any explanation so far for how all three situations can coexist given the assumption that the 'deponent' verb is actually just middle voice or reflexive in meaning. – Quack E. Duck Jul 07 '23 at 05:32
  • It would be really interesting to hear the perspective of someone who is familiar with that language feature firsthand! Your Danish examples really back up the idea of the active meaning developing out of an earlier mediopassive one (and that would make a lot more sense than the alternative of 'some verbs just randomly look passive when they're not'), but does that mean that even transitive verbs like 'follow' were at some point considered passive or reflexive too? – Quack E. Duck Jul 07 '23 at 05:48
  • @All Hopefully I didn't make any embarrassing mistakes in those example sentences. If I did, feel free to correct me :D – Quack E. Duck Jul 07 '23 at 05:49
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    @QuackE.Duck That particular verb (sequor) is actually reconstructed as being ‘deponent’ all the way back to Proto-Indo-European (cf. the Greek and Sanskrit cognates ἔπομαι and सचते sácate, which are also mediopassive in form). So if a change happened that the verb lost its active forms and the mediopassive forms took over, it happened so long ago that we don’t know how it happened. It’s not a huge stretch, though – to use Danish as an example again, reciprocative ‘follow’ (følges [med]) is common and just means ‘go together (with)’, which could become just ‘follow’ again. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jul 07 '23 at 07:30
  • @JanusBahsJacquet Wow, I would never have guessed that! I had always imagined a more sudden change happening to cause the form and meaning to diverge somehow (like on the timeframe of the spelling/pronunciation split that happened in English around Shakespeare's time). So it looks like Latin just 'inherited' that oddity (at least for 'sequor') from a distant ancestor instead of inventing it. The "reciprocative 'follow'" example you gave certainly shows how it could have happened - OK, I'm convinced! :) – Quack E. Duck Jul 07 '23 at 17:16
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English transitive verbs only have active and passive voices. This is a grammatical term and has nothing to do with the meanings of the words in a sentences. The main use is to provide emphasis on a different entity from that of using the active voice. (A different noun or pronoun or noun phrase can be put at the beginning of a sentence.) For example: "John hit the ball," and "The ball was hit by John," describe the same event but with different emphasis. The passive voice also allows for the performer ("agent" in some linguistic descriptions) to be deleted, a extreme form of emphasis: "The ball was hit."

ttw
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