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The (Non‐)Existence of the Middle Voice in Gothic: In Search of a Mirage
Author(s) -
Ratkus Artūras
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
transactions of the philological society
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.333
H-Index - 26
eISSN - 1467-968X
pISSN - 0079-1636
DOI - 10.1111/1467-968x.12190
Subject(s) - linguistics , verb , context (archaeology) , passive voice , history , value (mathematics) , focus (optics) , computer science , literature , psychology , philosophy , art , archaeology , physics , machine learning , optics
Gothic is unique among the Germanic languages in that it alone preserves Indo‐European mediopassive morphology with which it realises the passive voice in part of its verb paradigm. In an effort to dispel any misconceptions regarding the existence of a middle value allegedly realised by these synthetic passive verbs in Gothic, in this article I re‐examine the evidence discussed by Kleyner (2019). By bringing together a consistent application of criteria to the discussion of voice as a syntactic category and a consideration of the broader context of the evidence in question, as well as examining the relevant contrasts in attested Gothic, I show that all of the alleged examples of the middle voice are simple passives. Additionally, I discuss the properties of Gothic periphrastic passives and argue that the Gothic translators' motivations for using passive constructions to render Greek actives oscillate between native linguistic constraints and the need to convey a transparent and intelligible message. More broadly, I address a range of problems within the domain of methodology in comparative Gothic studies.