I
got a comment on YouTube from a listener named Steven, who asked about verbs
like the ones in this following sentence: "The screw screwed in more
easily than I thought it would." Clearly, the screw didn’t screw itself
in. The person who uttered the sentence
screwed it in. A similar sentence came
from a blacksmith he was talking with, who had cast some spearheads--that is,
he had shaped them by pouring molten metal into a mold. The blacksmith wasn’t
happy with how the spearheads had turned out, and he said, “Those spearheads
didn't cast very well.” As Steven pointed out, “[T]he spearheads couldn't have
cast themselves.” You might think phrasing a sentence this way would lead to
total confusion, but it doesn’t. How is that possible? Steven wondered if this
grammatical phenomenon has a name.
In fact,
there is a
name for it. It’s usually called the middle voice, although if you want a more
jargony name, you might prefer “mediopassive construction.” We’ve talked about
active voice and passive voice in other episodes, but how does middle voice fit
into the picture? To see how it does, we need to start with a recap of what
active and passive voice are.
Passive
in Meaning, but Active in Form
In a typical
active-voice sentence, the verb’s subject is the agent--the person or thing that performs the
action. For example, “The blacksmith cast the spearheads” is in the active
voice. The subject of the verb “cast” is “The blacksmith,” and the blacksmith
is the one who did the casting. Depending on what verb you choose, there might
also be a patient role,
for the person or thing that undergoes the action. In the sentence “The
blacksmith cast the spearheads,” the patient is the direct object, “the
spearheads,” since they’re what underwent the casting process.
On
the other hand, when a sentence is in the passive voice, the verb’s subject is the
patient. The sentence “The spearheads were cast” is in the passive voice, and
“the spearheads” is now the subject. As for the agent, it doesn’t have to be
expressed. If you want to express it, you can do it by using the word “by”; for
example, “The spearheads were cast by the blacksmith.” But here’s an important
point: Whether you express the agent or not, there has to be one. In other
words, if you say, “The spearheads were cast,” you’re implicitly saying that
someone or something cast them; it didn’t just happen on its own. We know this
is true, because a sentence like “The spearheads were cast, but no one cast
them” is a contradiction.
So now let’s
talk about “Those spearheads didn’t cast very well.” Once again, the patient is
the subject, so this sentence is similar to passive voice in that way. Also,
there was definitely an agent--the blacksmith--even though we’re not saying so
explicitly. So that makes two things that this sentence has in common with the
sentence in the passive voice.
However, in
form, “The spearheads didn’t cast well” does not look like passive voice. In English, a
verb phrase in the passive voice typically consists of some form of the verb
“be,” and a past participle. For example, in the passive-voice sentence “The
spearheads were cast,” we have “were,” which is a past-tense form of “be,” and
the past participle “cast”—“were cast.” We don’t have any of that in the
sentence “Those spearheads didn’t cast very well.” We just have the ordinary,
active-voice, negated verb phrase “didn’t cast.”
Other Properties of the Middle Voice
The middle
voice has some other differences from passive voice. With the passive voice,
you don’t have to mention the agent, although you can if you want to. With the
middle voice, you can’t. A sentence like “Those spearheads didn’t cast very
well by the blacksmith” is ungrammatical.
With the passive voice,
you don’t have to mention the agent, although you can if you want to. With
the middle voice, you can’t.
Second,
middle-voice sentences usually include some adverbial meaning, negation, or a
modal verb, or a combination of the three. “The spearheads didn’t cast very
well” has both negation (“didn’t”) and an adverb phrase (“very well”). “The
screw screwed in more easily than I thought it would” has the adverb phrase
“more easily than I thought it would.”
Third,
middle-voice sentences insinuate that the responsibility for the action is not
with the agent, but with the patient. When the blacksmith said, “Those
spearheads didn’t cast very well,” it sounds a bit like the bad casting was not
the blacksmith’s fault; maybe it was some problem with the metal. A clearer
example is “The screw screwed in easily.” The speaker isn’t saying that their
own mastery of hand tools allowed them to screw in the screw. Instead, something
about the inherent or designed properties of the screw made it possible. For
this reason, they sometimes also go by a more-specific name: the dispositional middle
voice. It was the disposition of the screw, something inherent to its nature,
that made it easy to screw in.
This
property is tied to the last one we’ll mention: Since middle-voice sentences
are more about saying something about the qualities of their subject, they
often don’t refer to a specific event. For example, “This history book reads
like a novel,” “My car drives smoothly,” and “Squiggly doesn’t embarrass
easily” are general statements, not about particular events. Possibly the most
famous dispositional middle-voice sentence in the United States is from a TV
commercial in the 1980s, which states that a certain brand of soup is “the soup
that eats like a meal.”
However, not
all middle-voice sentences are dispositional. For example, Steven’s sentences
about spearheads and screws do refer to particular events. So do sentences such
as “Your receipt is printing,” “The painting sold for $1.2 million,” and
“Suddenly, the tablecloth blew away.”
Patient-Subject Constructions
As it turns
out, middle-voice sentences are not the only kind of construction in which a
verb that ordinarily takes a direct object doesn’t take one, and instead has a
patient as its subject--and isn’t passive voice. English has two
others.
One of them
involves verbs that name actions that agents do to themselves or to each other.
To put it another way, the subjects of these verbs are both agent and patient.
For example, think about the verb “shave.” It can be used as an ordinary verb
with a direct object, in a sentence such as “Fenster shaved his tail.” But it
can also be used without a direct object, as in “Fenster shaved.” In that case,
it means the same thing as “Fenster shaved himself.” For another example, the
sentence “Squiggly and Aardvark hugged” means the same thing as “Squiggly and
Aardvark hugged each other,” even though it doesn’t use the phrase “each other.”
In these examples, the agent doing the shaving or hugging is also a patient,
getting shaved or receiving a hug.
The other
kind of patient-subject construction involves verbs such as “break,” “melt,”
“boil,” “freeze,” “open,” “close,” “burn,” and many others. Let’s illustrate
with the verb “burn”. You can definitely use “burn” with a direct object, in a
sentence like “My roommate had burned the cookies.” You can also put it in the
passive voice, as in “The cookies had been burned,” and your listeners will
know you mean it didn’t just happen; someone or something did it. But you can
also use it with a patient-subject, as in “The cookies had burned.” In this
sentence, maybe there was an agent, or maybe the burning just happened. The
speaker isn’t telling us. And as with dispositional middle-voice constructions,
we can’t specify an agent. The sentence “The cookies had burned by my roommate”
isn’t a possible sentence. These verbs go by several names, but the one that I
find easiest to understand is “anticausative verbs.”
So all
together, there are four kinds of patient-subject constructions in English, and
only one of them is the actual passive voice! The other three are the verbs of
reflexive or reciprocal action, as in “I dressed quickly” and “Where did Kim
and Sandy meet?”; the anticausative verbs in sentences such as “The door
opened” or “My tomatoes froze”; and the middle-voice sentences that kicked off
this episode, such as “The spearheads didn’t cast well” and “My new boat
handles like a dream.” We need a convenient name for these three kinds of
constructions, so I’m going to use the acronym RAM: R for reflexive and reciprocal,
A for anticausative, and M for middle voice.
Middle Voice in Other Languages
Not all
languages express RAM meanings the way English does, but interestingly, these
meanings tend to cluster together in different languages. A paper by Artemis
Alexiadou and Edit Doron, published in 2012, divides languages into three
groups. The group that includes English lets active-voice forms express RAM
meanings. Another group, which includes Classical Greek, modern Hebrew,
standard Arabic, and an African language called Fula, have an active voice and
a passive voice, and also a third set of verb forms, which is used for RAM
meanings. This third set, you may have guessed, is called the middle voice.
This group of languages also includes some of the Romance languages, such as
Spanish and French. If you know some Spanish, you may have noticed that a
sentence such as Se
habla español, which is usually translated as “Spanish is spoken,”
actually seems to mean “Spanish speaks itself”! That’s because the same verb
forms, namely the reflexive ones, are used both for actual reflexive meanings
and for patient-subject meanings where the agent is unknown.
The third
group of languages that Alexiadou and Doron identify includes languages such as
Amharic and Modern Greek. These languages don’t have a passive voice at
all--instead, they have an active voice and a voice that covers all the
situations where a patient is a subject. So for that reason the non-active
voice in these languages is often called the medio-passive.
Middle
Voice Everywhere
According to
one study, middle voice is on the rise in English, with an especially big
increase in frequency and variety during the twentieth century. Once you start
thinking about the middle voice in English, you’ll start to notice it everywhere.
In fact, and this is a true story, in a single day while I was writing this
script, I noticed two of them in a magazine article about the airline industry.
One sentence said that deregulation “made it easier for new carriers to
launch,” with the patient “new carriers” as its subject. The other said that
the galleys were the places “where we enter and exit the plane, [and] where the
drink carts stow.” The drink carts don’t stow themselves; the flight attendants
stow them. Mere hours later, an air-conditioner technician told me as he wrote
up the paperwork for a service call, “The bill will be sending this week.” A
couple more hours later, I downloaded some updated software for a handheld
device, and a message on my screen said, “Your file is downloading.” The
instructions I was following said that once I selected the downloaded file,
“Your software will install automatically.”
Once you start thinking
about the middle voice in English, you’ll start to notice it everywhere.
The last two sentences
show that sometimes it’s hard to say for sure that a verb is an implicit
reflexive, an anticausative, or a middle-voice verb. On the one hand, “Your
software will install automatically” means more or less the same thing as “Your
software will install itself,” so maybe “install” is an implicit reflexive. On
the other hand, it also means more or less the same thing as “Your software
will install all
by itself,” which makes it look more like an anticausative. And
finally, if you don’t give any thought to the agent at all, and just go with
the flow, the sentence just looks like another middle-voice construction.
That’s probably why these RAM meanings tend to pattern together so often. There
are situations where it’s just not clear whether they involve just one participant,
or two. If you use the same verb forms for all these situations, context can do
most of the work of resolving them into the different kinds of RAM meanings, or
it can leave it conveniently ambiguous.
References
Alexiadou,
Artemis, and Edit Doron. "The Syntactic Construction of Two Non-Active
Voices: Passive and Middle." Journal of Linguistics 48.1 (2012): 1-34. Print.
Hundt,
Marianne. English
Mediopassive Constructions : A Cognitive, Corpus-Based Study of their Origin,
Spread, and Current Status. 58 Vol. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. Print.
Bradley,
Ryan. "The Incredible! Shrinking! Airplane!" Popular Science (Fall
2018): 52-9. Print.
Kaufmann,
Ingrid. "Middle Voice." Lingua 117.10 (2007): 1677-714. Print.
What is middle voice?
The so-called middle voice is
an approximate type of grammatical voice in which the subject both performs
and receivesthe action expressed by the verb. In other words, the subject
acts as both the agent and the receiver (i.e.,
the direct object) of the
action. For example:
- “He injured himself playing
rugby.” (He is the agent and himself is the
receiver of the action.)
- “The cat is scratching itself.”
(The cat is the agent and itself is the
receiver of the action.)
Middle-voice verbs follow the same syntactic
structure as in the active voice (agent +
verb), but function semantically as passive-voice verbs. As a
result, the middle voice is described as a combination of the
active and passive voices.
Because there is no verb form exclusive to the
middle voice, it is often categorized as the active voice since it uses the
same verb structure in a sentence. The following examples highlight the
similarities between the two:
- “Some snakes have tried to eat inedible
things.” (active voice)
- “Some snakes have tried to eat themselves.”
(middle
voice)
- “The man accidentally hit his
face.” (active voice)
- “The man accidentally hit himself in
the face.” (middle voice)
How to identify the middle
voice
We can distinguish the middle voice from the
active voice by determining whether there is a reflexive pronoun after the verb
(in the direct object position) or an intransitive verb acting upon
the agent.
When the direct object is a
reflexive pronoun
Because the agent is also the receiver of the
action in the middle voice, we can clarify this connection by inserting a
reflexive pronoun after the verb. The reflexive pronoun
assumes the role of the direct object and indicates that the
agent is acting upon itself. For example:
- “The child warmed herself by
blowing into her hands.” (Herself is a reflexive pronoun that
refers to the child.)
- “Small dogs tend to hurt themselves when
playing with bigger dogs.” (Themselves is a reflexive pronoun
that refers to small dogs.)
Many middle-voice verbs are transitive
verbs and therefore require a direct object in the
form of a reflexive pronoun. Without a reflexive pronoun, the receiver of the
action becomes unclear, and the sentence loses coherence. For example:
- “The child warmed by
blowing into her hands.” (What or whom did
the child warm?)
- “Small dogs tend to hurt when
playing with bigger dogs.” (What or whom do
small dogs tend to hurt?)
Reusing the agent instead of adding a reflexive pronoun will affect the coherence of
the sentence or even change its meaning altogether:
- “The child warmed the
child by blowing into her hands.” (implies the child warmed
a different child)
- “Small dogs tend to hurt small
dogs when playing with bigger dogs.” (implies small
dogs tend to hurt other small dogs)
Likewise, using a personal pronoun instead of a
reflexive pronoun will change or confuse the meaning of the verb’s action:
- “The child warmed her by
blowing into her hands.” (implies the child warmed
a different child)
- “Small dogs tend to hurt them when
playing with bigger dogs.” (indicates an unspecified object of the
verb hurt other than small dogs)
However, there do exist certain verbs for which the
reflexive pronouns are implied and may therefore be
eliminated. For example:
- “My father is shaving himself in
the bathroom.” (with the reflexive pronoun himself)
- “My father is shaving in
the bathroom.” (without reflexive the pronoun)
- “She always stretches herself before
doing yoga.” (with the reflexive pronoun herself)
- “She always stretches before
doing yoga.” (without reflexive the pronoun)
When the verb is intransitive
and acting upon the agent
Certain intransitive verbs can
be used to modify an agent (usually an inanimate object) that is also the
receiver of the action. In the middle voice, this type of verb does not take
a reflexive pronoun (or any direct object). For example:
- “My sister’s lunch is cooking on
the stove.” (Cook is an intransitive verb indicating what is
being cooked.)
- “This car doesn’t drive smoothly
anymore.” (Drive is an intransitive verb indicating what is
being driven.)
- “Her engagement ring broke in
half.” (Break is an intransitive verb indicating what is
being broken.)
However, active-voice verbs can also be
intransitive and are expressed identically to middle-voice
verbs. For example:
- “The boy laughed when he
heard the joke.” (Laugh is an intransitive verb
indicating who is laughing.)
- “Someone is crying in the
hallway.” (Cry is an intransitive verb indicating who is
crying.)
You can determine whether an intransitive verb
is in the active voice or the middle voice by changing the verb into the passive
voice. Doing so will convert the intransitive verb into a transitive
verb and the agent into the receiver of the action. If the
meaning of the sentence stays roughly the same, it is in the middle voice. If
the meaning changes dramatically or lacks coherence, it is in the active voice.
For example:
- “My sister’s lunch is cooking on
the stove.” (original)
·
“My
sister’s lunch is being cooked on the stove.” (passive
voice)
Because cook can be converted
into a transitive verb in the passive voice without altering
the meaning of the original sentence, we know that the original sentence must
be in the middle voice.
Here is
another example:
- “The boy laughed when he
heard the joke.” (original)
·
“The
boy was laughed when he heard the joke.” (passive
voice)
When converted into the passive voice, the
original sentence loses coherence; therefore, we know it must be in the active
voice.
Quiz
1. Which of the following is the correct word
order for a middle-voice sentence?
a) agent – verb – reflexive pronounb) subject – verbc) subject – reflexive pronoun – verbd) A & Be) A & Cf) None of the above
2. Which of the following sentences is in
the middle voice?
a) “Brianna wants to see the world for herself.”b) “The mountain appeared vaster than the sky itself.”c) “I can’t contain myself when I’m excited about something.”d) “Children are encouraged to play by themselves.”
3. Which of the following sentences is in
the active voice?
a) “He can never control himself when he’s angry.”b) “Edmund is shaving in the upstairs bathroom.”c) “What’s cooking for dinner tonight?”d)
“You should always stretch your muscles before exercising.”
4. Which of the following sentences is not in
the middle voice?
a) “The child exhausted her by playing too many games.”b) “The man saw himself in the mirror.”c) “Joanna entertained herself by whistling.”d)
“The employees dedicated themselves to their work.”