The journey of the middle voice: from antiquity to linguistic typology

Abstract

ABSTRACT The notion of middle voice finds its roots in classical antiquity, when it was first proposed by grammarians to describe a particular (set of) forms in the verbal paradigm of Ancient Greek. From medieval to modern times, the middle retained centre stage in linguistic descriptions of Latin and Greek, and in the 19th century, when combined with insights from Indian grammatical thought, it became a popular topic in comparative Indo-European linguistics. With the rise of linguistic typology and a more intense practice of language documentation, the reception of the middle voice in modern linguistics followed erratic and at times conflicting paths, engendering an inconsistency of usages that renders the term vague, if not useless. It is only recently that, in the wake of the discussion on the comparability problem in typology, a new comparative concept of the middle has been proposed, which might reconcile the millennia-long history of research on the topic with current needs of typology and language description.