The syntactic construction of two non-active voices: passive and middle

The paper offers a theoretical characterization of the middle Voice as distinct from the passive Voice, and addresses the cross-linguistic morphological variation in realizing these two non-active Voices in different classes of languages, represented by Hebrew, Greek and English. The two non-active Voices are the morphological realization of two distinct syntactic Voice heads generating middle and passive clauses respectively. The former are cross-linguistically interpreted as (i) anticausative, (ii) reflexive (and reciprocal), (iii) dispositional middle, and (iv) medio-passive, which is distinct from passive. This variation in the interpretation of the middle Voice reflects different properties of the root rather than the application of four different lexical rules pos-tulated by lexicalist theories. 1. TH E P R O B L E M Most theoretical syntactic studies recognize, in addition to the active Voice, a single non-active Voice, PASSIVE.2 The term MIDDLE is not used to denote Voice; rather, it is usually restricted to a form of the verb denoting DISPOSITION, as in the bread cuts easily (see e.g. Fagan 1992)