The other voices

Language

Beauty & a key to knowledge

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Nothing is ever so simple

When we learn foreign languages, we are taught forms for the active and passive voices of verbs and it is usually implied that there are just the two. So we learn how to say

Tom shaved Bill. and

Bill was shaved by Tom.

Tom shaved. ?

Tom shaved himself.

In this case the subject ("agent") is the same person as the direct object ("patient"). We use the same verb form as for the active voice and we might think of the verb as being intransitive where we use no reflexive pronoun. The Romance languages I have studied use reflexive pronouns a great deal more than English does, but some languages have a middle voice to deal with such instances. A good example is Ancient Greek and there is an explanation of its middle voice on this website.

The mediopassive voice

Whether you regard shaved in Tom shaved as being intransitive or in the middle voice, there is more of a case for arguing that English has a mediopassive voice. Again the verb has the same form as in the active voice, but certain constructions must look decidedly odd to non-native users of English.

The mediopassive voice subsumes the meanings of both the middle voice and the passive voice. It can be argued that in English we use this voice when we treat a verb which is normally transitive as unaccusative. Consider the following sentences:

This shirt irons easily.

The book sold well.

Neither the shirt nor the book is an agent. Somebody irons the shirt and they find this easy to do. Similarly, booksellers had been selling the book successfully.

I am reminded of something which is rather similar and is sometimes referred to as the passival tense, although it seems to me that it has more to do with voice than with tense.^[Note] We might simply say:

The dinner was being cooked.

but until some time in the early 19th century this construction was not used and people would have said:

The dinner was cooking.

It is said that this use of the progressive "tense" has died out, but I think I have just demonstrated that that is not so. Other examples show that it is alive and well:

Music was playing in the next room.

The trumpets were sounding.

Various other voices

Other voices exist in various languages and these include:

• Adjutative voice
• Antipassive voice
• Applicative voice
• Causative voice
• Circumstantial voice
• Reciprocal voice

If you are interested, take a look at the Wikipedia articles to get a taste of how these different voices function in practice.

Note
• There seems to be a lot of woolly thinking about such things. Similarly, what are commonly referred to as the continuous and progressive tenses have more to do with aspect than with tense:
• He is dressing for dinner. This could be seen as being the progressive aspect form of He dresses for dinner.
• He is wearing a lounge suit. And this could be seen as being the continuous aspect form of He wears a lounge suit.

Posted September 2018