the middle voice option

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Avangi

#510181 Tue, 06 May 08 05:04 AM

ganesh77 started a thread which wrapped up on April 25, called "how to explain the usage of the ergative verb?" She's teaching ESL in an Asian country and her superior is Asian, I think.

I had never heard the expression "ergative," which she defined as verbs having both a transitive and an intransitive use. Her understanding was that to use these verbs in the passive is incorrect.

This seemed plausible on the face of it, but a controversy erupted and I was persuaded to take the other side. In Googling this, I found that "ergative" was usually coupled with "the middle voice option," I broke the window (active) The window was broken [by me] (passive) & The window broke (middle).

I brought this up in the thread, as it seemed to shed light on her problem in a couple of ways. She replied that indeed, this was what her superior had mentioned. I tried to coax some of our members to comment, but no one would bite.

I noticed that the majority of the Google references were from Asian sources (universities and professors) eg. Univ. of Hong Kong.

I've never found the ESL community to be shy about embracing non-traditional approaches to things. On the contrary, they seem to invent them.

Could someone comment on this? Do we mean to disparage "the middle voice option"? Does the "ergative verb" concept have a life of its own apart from the "middle voice" discussion?

Thanks for your consideration. - A.

Avangi

Joined on Mon, Nov 19 2007

Senior Member (2,469)

". . . le plaisir delicieux et toujours nouveau d'une occupation inutile." - Henri de Regnier

Verbs, Universities, Expressions

Forbes

#510217 Tue, 06 May 08 08:01 AM

I confess to being equally puzzled. This is what I said in a thread about a year ago, but did not receive a lot of comment:

1. I am having some difficulty in distinguishing between instances of ergativity and the middle voice. Are they (in English at least) the same phenonemon described from two different perspectives?

2. At first sight these two sentences seem to have some sort of equivalence:

A "Dinner is cooking nicely"

B "This wine is drinking well"

In both cases the verb is syntactically active, but semantically passive. If there is a difference, which is a case of ergativity and which a case of the middle voice?

3. I have been playing around with the sentences.

I notice that if you take out the adverbs two quite different things happen. In the case of A you get:

C "Dinner is cooking"

No problem with that.

But, in the case of C you get:

D "This wine is drinking"

Not a sentence likely to be uttered in normal discourse.

I also note that whilst "Dinner is cooking" can be said to be equivalent to "Someone is cooking dinner", "Dinner is cooking nicely" does not seem to be equivalent to "Someone is cooking dinner nicely".

What is going on? How do adverbs interact with ergativity/the middle voice?

4. If I understand correctly, languages described as "ergative" are those where a noun which is the subject of an intransitive sentence is marked the same as the object of a transitive sentence, but it is nevertheless possible to say that a language not described as ergative can display ergativity. In other words "ergativity" implies some sort of equivalence: for nouns, the subject of an intransitive sentence is equivalent to the object of a transitive sentence; for verbs, an ergative verb is one can take the same noun as subject or object without a change in meaning.

Further, English does not have a middle voice in the limited sense that, unlike Ancient Greek, it does not have a separate form of the verb to express it.

So, my final question is: is it helpful to use the terms "ergative" and "middle voice" when describing English?

Forbes

Joined on Thu, Jun 16 2005

Regular Member (827)

Nouns, Verbs, Adverbs

Avangi

#510410 Tue, 06 May 08 03:22 PM

Hi Forbes,

Thank you very much for your reply. I had not previously picked up on the "other languages" connection and it will take me a while to digest what you've said.

Personally, I thought the middle voice concept was very helpful (if un-traditional) in addressing the problems of the American ESL teacher in Asia. You're the first site member (other than the original poster and myself) to mention the term "middle voice." The poster mentioned it only in response to my question about what I'd seen on the web, and it rang a bell re what her/his (sorry, I don't really know which) supervisor had said. I got one response on "ergative," but not from a staff member. That was on the poster's [erroneous] understanding that passive voice was not allowed with ergative verbs.

Thanks again, - A.

Avangi

Verbs

CalifJim

#511054 Thu, 08 May 08 03:30 AM

Maybe I'll see the usefulness of terms like ergative, unergative, accusative, and unaccusative verbs, and middle voice once I understand them. I've grown frustrated at disentangling them all in the past, and that has not encouraged me to try again! I've even noted apparent contradictions in the definitions of these terms. It seems to depend on which author you read and what year the work was published.

Probably because of my own failures to understand them, I don't see anything about these fine distinctions that would help learners of English. If I'm not mistaken these distinctions are of recent invention, and it seems to me that for centuries people have learned English without them, so I remain unconvinced of their usefulness -- for now.

CalifJim

Joined on Mon, Aug 2 2004

California

Veteran Member (16,003)

"There are no facts, only interpretations" - Nietzsche

Verbs, Accusative

Avangi

#511066 Thu, 08 May 08 04:56 AM

Thanks, Jim, I deeply appreciate your reply.

While I recall accusative from H.S. Latin, I didn't know that ergtative had its roots in other languages until Forbes posted. I'm getting the idea that this might be true of "middle voice" as well. So I guess they'd be of recent invention vis a vis ESL.

Can you say that the English ESL community and the Asian ESL community stand as two camps, each favoring its own approach? One would expect the web to make short work of such an arrangement. The languages which Forbes mentions are European. If the Asians have found some usefulness here, perhaps the ideas deserve a second look. Ganesh77 (a Canadian) had a problem arise while teaching ESL in an Asian country. The problem was to coordinate the "class book" written "somewhere in England" and the instructions of the Director of English (presumably Asian) and an education in Canadian English.

I wonder if perhaps the Asians view European languages as a package, and therefore must deal with ergative and middle voice in teaching these languages to their native students.

Thanks again, CJ.

Best wishes, - A.

Avangi

Accusative

Forbes

#511215 Thu, 08 May 08 01:51 PM

It is interesting that when linguists first described Basque, an ergative language (i.e. one that marks the object of a transitive verb in the same way as the subject of an intransitive verb) they did not understand what was going on and declared that Basque had no active voice. It seems that since they realised their error they have been making up for it by seeing ergativity everywhere.

Forbes