The sentence “these shirts wash easily”.

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Aga.nd

#406760 Mon, 20 Aug 07 12:57 PM

The sentence “these shirts wash easily” are often referred to as:

anti-passive

ergative

middle

passive

I think that this is middle voice, but another options can be possible as well. What do you think?

Aga.nd

Joined on Mon, Aug 20 2007

New Member (02)

Alienvoord

#406996 Mon, 20 Aug 07 09:30 PM

imo the best description is middle voice: syntatically active but semantically passive.
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003302.html

Alienvoord

Joined on Tue, Jul 25 2006

Toronto

Full Member (315)

I'm a Canadian English speaker

milky

#407775 Wed, 22 Aug 07 02:12 PM

Aga.nd wrote:

The sentence “these shirts wash easily” are often referred to as:

anti-passive

ergative

middle

passive

I think that this is middle voice, but another options can be possible as well. What do you think?

middle

milky

Joined on Thu, Jan 15 2004

Senior Member (3,149)

Hume said that if we had perfect or complete descriptive knowledge of reality, we could not, by reasoning, derive a single valid "ought".

Aga.nd

#407897 Wed, 22 Aug 07 06:40 PM

Thanks

Aga.nd