Thrashing through Thrax on Voice

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Stephen Carlson
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Thrashing through Thrax on Voice

Post by Stephen Carlson »

Every once in a while I like to take another stab at figuring out what (pseudo-?) Dionysius Thrax is saying about voice. Some of have looked at it before on Mike Aubrey's blog post. Let's give it another go.

Here's the passage, with the grammatical terms in italics and the examples in bold:
Dionysius Thrax wrote:διαθέσεις εἰσὶ τρεῖς, ἐνέργεια, πάθος, μεσότης· ἐνέργεια μὲν οἷον τύπτω, πάθος δὲ οἷον τύπτομαι, μεσότης δὲ ἡ ποτὲ μὲν ἐνέργειαν ποτὲ δὲ πάθος παριστᾶσα, οἷον πέπηγα διέφθορα ἐποιησάμην ἐγραψάμην.
For the purposes of discussion, I would like to toss out here that Thrax is conceptualizing diathesis in terms of a prototypical transitive construction, using the verb τύπτω as the example. For the grammatical form where the subject is the Agent, he calls it ἐνέργεια. For the grammatical form where the subject is the Patient, he calls it πάθος. For those forms that don't fit this conception, he gives up and calls it μεσότης. In his example, we have Patient-like subjects of ἐνέργεια-looking perfects πέπηγα διέφθορα, and we have Agent-like subjects of πάθος-looking aorist middles ἐποιησάμην ἐγραψάμην.

All in all, a fairly unsophisticated analysis of the Greek voice system, not used today and not particularly insightful. I would like to suggest, though, that there is one area we have regressed over Thrax, though. We don't really have a clean category for these non-kappa, non-aspirated perfects that seem to change diathesis like πέπηγα διέφθορα. But of these perfects have either aspirated (πέπηχα) or kappa (διέφθαρκα) forms that are "better" behaved diathetically. It is probably not good to lump them in with the middles, as Thrax did, but it is also not good to basically ignore them.
Stephen C. Carlson, Ph.D.
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Re: Thrashing through Thrax on Voice

Post by cwconrad »

Exactly what Dionysius is saying doesn't seem to me altogether clear. I'm not convinced that he's thinking in terms of the English-type polarity of active and passive. I've thought that he might have used the term πάθος for what we oridinarily call "middle-passive" -- the μσι/σαι/ται;μην/σο/το forms that do indeed have the patient as a subject in a process that may be reflexive or may be intransitive, or may be passive -- i.e. the verb-form itself has, as Rutger Allan, puts it, "polysemy." On the other hand, Dionysius' statement doesn't really indicate anything about the θη forms.

As for the perfect "active" forms, it's noteworthy, I think, that Dionysius cites what we call "second perfects" (πέπηγα, διέφθορα), not as Stephen notes, what we distinguish as "first perfects" or "kappa perfects" (πεπηχα, διέφθαρκα). The "kappa perfects" do tend to be transitive with "active" meanings, while many of the "second perfects" correspond to middle verbs, as is the case with πέπηγα, διέφθορα, ὅλωλα, γέγονα. Evidently these "second perfects" are older than the "kappa perfects" just as the athematic second aorists are older than sigmatic aorists. There's some sort of a kinship between the athematic second aorists and the second perfects in the case of several middle verbs, for instance διέφθορα/διεφθάρην, πέπηγα/ἐπάγην; on the other hand the second perfects, ὄλωλα and γέγονα correspond to second aorist intransitive middles ὠλόμην and ἐγενόμην. I'm inclined to think that the archaeology of the Greek verbal system encrypts much of what's hard to schematize in a fashion that does justice to the complexity of the morphology and usage of middle verbs. All this is a consequence of the fact that verbs in everyday usage tend to retain their older forms (and usage) well after newer or simplified morphology has become standard.
οὔτοι ἀπ’ ἀρχῆς πάντα θεοὶ θνητοῖς ὑπέδειξαν,
ἀλλὰ χρόνῳ ζητέοντες ἐφευρίσκουσιν ἄμεινον. (Xenophanes, Fragment 16)

Carl W. Conrad
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Re: Thrashing through Thrax on Voice

Post by MAubrey »

I'm not sure that we can get much closer than we already have. I like Shibatani's discussion, as you already know. There's too much mystery. The second perfects make some sense within the historical linguistic paradigm argued by Janasoff in Hittite and the Indo-European Verb, since Middles and Perfects come from the same historical source. So maybe that's part of it: the answer lies both in the history of those forms as well as the semantic relationship between them, maybe?
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Re: Thrashing through Thrax on Voice

Post by Stephen Carlson »

Upon reviewing Shibatani's treatment, I think he's basically following Andersen, whose book, A New Look at the Passive (1991), he cites early in the discussion. I have not gotten a hold of this book, but I found a cite to a follow-up article: Paul Kent Andersen, “Remarks on Dionysios Thrax’s Concept of ‘Diáthesis’,”
Historiographia linguistica 21, no. 1/2 (1994): 1–37, with the following abstract:
The purpose of this paper is to present a new interpretation of Dionysios Thrax's original definition of diathesis. Diathesis was regarded as one of seven morphological categories of the (finite) verb of which there were two and only two formal variants, i.e., energeia "performance" and pathos "experience" (generally referred to as the active and middle sets of personal endings respectively). Diathesis was manifested in the personal ending of the verb, whose function was to represent various properties of the 'subject', i.e., its person and number as well as its diathesis "disposition" — or general thematic relation — to the verb. The morpheme for the diathesis energeia "performance" exhibited the active set of personal endings as its 'form' and expressed the person and number of the subject as well as the fact that it 'performed' the predication as its 'schematic' meaning; the morpheme for the diathesis pathos "experience" exhibited the middle set of personal endings as its 'form' and expressed the person and number of the subject as well as the fact that it 'experienced' the predication as its 'schematic' meaning. Moreover, just as the other Greek (and Roman) grammarians, so too was Dionysios Thrax well aware of instances in which there was a discrepancy between 'form' and 'meaning'. Accordingly, he incorporated such 'anomalies' into his definition by mentioning four concrete examples and labeling them with his technical term mesótes "middle": the first two examples were active forms which exhibited the meaning of páthos, whereas the second two examples were middle forms which exhibited the meaning of energeia.
Not having read the article yet, I'd be curious to find out what Andersen does, if anything, with the so-called aorist passive forms, which are ignored by Dionysius Thrax. But in any case, it looks like the grammarian is doing the old trick of naming the exception when his first level of approximation fails.
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Re: Thrashing through Thrax on Voice

Post by Stephen Carlson »

It occurs to me that when Dionysius gives examples of μεσότης, what the examples ἐποιησάμην and ἐγραψάμην have in common is not just the fact that they are aorist middles but also that they are both autobenefactives, where the affectedness of the subject is about as minimal as one can get without being zero.
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Re: Thrashing through Thrax on Voice

Post by cwconrad »

Stephen Carlson wrote:It occurs to me that when Dionysius gives examples of μεσότης, what the examples ἐποιησάμην and ἐγραψάμην have in common is not just the fact that they are aorist middles but also that they are both autobenefactives, where the affectedness of the subject is about as minimal as one can get without being zero.
"Autobenefactives" -- splendid term for what in fact accounts for a sizable proportion of middle-voice usage; it's probably the only category of middle-voice usage that the student who learns the traditional account of voice really understands, since it's a qualification of transitive active formation; it's also probably the only kind of middle-voice that is not deemed a "deponent" in the traditional pedagogy. It might be noted, however, that ποιεῖσθαι with the accusative of a verbal noun is a very common Hellenistic auxiliary: cf. BDAG s.v. ποιέω, 7.
οὔτοι ἀπ’ ἀρχῆς πάντα θεοὶ θνητοῖς ὑπέδειξαν,
ἀλλὰ χρόνῳ ζητέοντες ἐφευρίσκουσιν ἄμεινον. (Xenophanes, Fragment 16)

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
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