Nuance in the passive voice

Semantic Range, Lexicography, and other approaches to word meaning - in general, or for particular words.
Joan Holmes
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Nuance in the passive voice

Post by Joan Holmes »

I am presently writing a critique of P.B.Payne's recent Man and Woman, One in Christ. The author appears unaware of either aspect or possible nuance in the Greek verb, e.g. at Acts 26:1 epitrepetai. I am looking for a good source which discusses and/or defines nuance in the passive voice, specifically the 'hiding' of the agent. Can anyone help me?
Eeli Kaikkonen
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Re: Nuance in the passive voice

Post by Eeli Kaikkonen »

Joan Holmes wrote: I am looking for a good source which discusses and/or defines nuance in the passive voice
The first step is to get to know the recent trend in studies on voice. See http://artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/GrkVc.html. Not all will agree with that, at least for now, but it has too much knowledge and common sense behind it to be ignored.

The main point is that there's no independent passive voice, there's only 'mediopassive' voice. A verb is semantically 'passive' when the agent can contextually be differentiated from the patient, i.e. it's clear from the context that the grammatical subject can't be the agent. (This is my own description and may be inaccurate.) One consequence of this is that Greek doesn't always tell whether the subject is the actor or not, it tells only that subject is affected by the action. This of course may affect on views on "hiding the agent", whatever that means.
Alex Hopkins
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Re: Nuance in the passive voice

Post by Alex Hopkins »

Joan Holmes wrote:I am presently writing a critique of P.B.Payne's recent Man and Woman, One in Christ. The author appears unaware of either aspect or possible nuance in the Greek verb, e.g. at Acts 26:1 epitrepetai. I am looking for a good source which discusses and/or defines nuance in the passive voice, specifically the 'hiding' of the agent. Can anyone help me?
There's a book Expressions of agency in ancient Greek by Coulter H. George (Cambridge University Press, 2005), but I'm not sure that it addresses what you're particularly interested in, i.e., the hiding of the agent.

Alex Hopkins
Melbourne, Australia
Mark Lightman
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Re: Nuance in the passive voice

Post by Mark Lightman »

Joan wrote:
I am looking for a good source which discusses and/or defines nuance in the passive voice, specifically the 'hiding' of the agent. Can anyone help me?
Hi, Joan,

Hiding the agent, also known as cryptopoiesis, is a feature of many languages besides Greek. The most famous example is President Reagan's 1986 admission:
Mistakes were made.
You could argue that cryptopoiesis is found in Acts 26:1
Ἁγρίππας δὲ πρὸς τὸν Παῦλον ἔφη ἐπιτρέπεταί σοι περὶ σεαυτοῦ λέγειν.
where it is not Agrippa who is allowing Paul to speak, but the occasion. "Now would be a good time for you to defend yourself."

Similarly, in 1 Cor. 14:34
οὐ γὰρ ἐπιτρέπεται αὐταῖς λαλεῖν
it could be argued that it is not Paul who is not allowing women to speak in Church, but the OCCASION of the Gnostics targeting women with their heresy. "Now would be a good time for the women to sit this one out."
Alex Hopkins
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Re: Nuance in the passive voice

Post by Alex Hopkins »

Joan Holmes wrote asking about the use of the passive to hide the agent.

Another article that might be worth checking out is The Our Father and 3rd Person Imperatives, by Mark A. Matson of Milligan College:
But a central issue ... is the use of the passive to hide the agent – a common use of the passive in English.
(See http://milligan.academia.edu/MarkMatson ... Imperative)

Mark Lightman wrote,
Hiding the agent, also known as cryptopoiesis, is a feature of many languages besides Greek.
The term is new to me, Mark. Could you give further information on this, and particularly if it's been used with reference to Greek? I tried a Google search without luck.

Alex Hopkins
Melbourne, Australia
Eeli Kaikkonen
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Re: Nuance in the passive voice

Post by Eeli Kaikkonen »

Mark Lightman wrote: Hiding the agent, also known as cryptopoiesis, is a feature of many languages besides Greek. The most famous example is President Reagan's 1986 admission:
Mistakes were made.
You could argue that cryptopoiesis is found in Acts 26:1
Ἁγρίππας δὲ πρὸς τὸν Παῦλον ἔφη ἐπιτρέπεταί σοι περὶ σεαυτοῦ λέγειν.
where it is not Agrippa who is allowing Paul to speak, but the occasion. "Now would be a good time for you to defend yourself."
Both "hide" the agent, meaning that it's not expressed, but in the first one agent is clearly human, while in the second it would be "the occasion". Only in the first one the speaker tries actually to hide or obscure something. In the second one Paul is the one to whom the turn is given and to whom the discourse focus is turned, and therefore Agrippa doesn't say "I let you speak". It's just fantastic to imagine that a KING in that culture would wait for a good occasion and then hint to another person, let alone a prisoner, that this would be a good time to speak. But as we can see, this is about the larger context, not about the meaning of passive.

If we continue with ἐπιτρέπω, I will not believe such an "occasional" explanation unless it can be shown with clear examples that this lexeme is used like that, namely that it's impersonal occasion which does the permitting. I believe that talking about "hiding the agent" in the case of these passages is misleading. In these passages the agent is hidden only in the meaning "not important in the discourse and therefore not expressed". If I understood correctly what Payne is trying to do, he just says that the agent isn't personal but impersonal. That wouldn't be "hiding" done by a NT writer. If Payne is talking about cryptopoiesis, it's just misleading. (Let's remember that I don't know what he's actually saying, only what the writers in this forum are saying.)

And by the way, isn't the "divine passive" a form of cryptopoiesis? It's common in the NT to use passive to implicitly tell that God is the agent.

Anyways, this whole thing looks to me like it's very easy to do eisegesis here. You can easily use circular reasoning: "I feel that it it must be occasion which permits. Let's try 'hiding the agent'. Oh yes, it fits! Passive can mean that, so it must be 'hiding'. Therefore it must the occasion which permits".

This "hiding" should first be described, explained and defined very carefully before we can make any conclusions about grammar. Even now I may have embarrassed myself by talking about wrong things, because It's not really clear what "hiding the agent" means :)
cwconrad
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Re: Nuance in the passive voice

Post by cwconrad »

The question raised is a good one, but, as Eeli has pretty clearly shown, Mark’s answer is not altogether adequate: “The occasion” cannot be the subject of ἐπιτρέπεται in Acts 26:1 -- nor, for that matter, does the explanation that “the OCCASION of the Gnostics targeting women with their heresy” is the subject of ἐπιτρέπεται in 1 Cor 14:34 (οὐ γὰρ ἐπιτρέπεται αὐταῖς λαλεῖν) quite work either. “Cryptopoiesis” (nice coinage, Mark -- is it your own or did you find it somewhere?) might fit President Reagan’s “Mistakes were made” insofar as that really is comparable to the so-called “divine passive” (which always did seem to me to be a bogus rationalization, rather like what we used to call “philosopher’s fatigue” as undergrads (“Call it an act of God if you can’t explain it.”

There’s clearly a difference between an action that can only be performed by an agent and a situation in which there is no impediment to doing whatever one may wish to do. I think that we may rightly think of an agent when ἐπιτρέπεται is negated as in 1 Cor 14:34: there is a rule in place, even if it is no more than a matter of common understanding: “women have no right to speak.”

But the question I would raise here -- and I really don’t have a very clear notion about this -- is this: is ἐπιτρέπεται with dative here being used as a passive at all or is it impersonal in the same way that ἑξεστι + dative is impersonal with the sense, “it is possible” or “it is permissible”? Or think of the familiar proposition with which the Enchiridion of Epictetus opens, Τῶν ὄντων τὰ μέν ἐστιν ἐφʼ ἡμῖν, τὰ δὲ οὐκ ἐφʼ ἡμῖν -- “Some things are within our power, others are not.”

It really isn’t a matter of hiding the agent, is it? In Acts 26:1 it’s a matter of the prefect advising Paul that there is no restriction imposed upon him if he wants to explain himself. Could Felix not just as well have said, ἔξεστίν σοι λαλεῖν? “You’re free to speak.” Of course there’s a difference between “You may speak freely” and “You can say what you will.” And there really isn’t any question that it’s Felix who wants Paul to have his say.

In my own efforts to probe ancient Greek voice usage, the impersonal constructions have been most troublesome to me. They are unlike the “quasi-reflexive” usages such as ταράσσεσθαι/ταράσσειν ἑαυτὸν of intense emotional disturbance -- that’s a regular category of middle verbs. But there are middle-voice usages, some of which are cmparable to active impersonals, such as φαίνεται (comparable to δοκεῖ).

It may be that we cannot be very precise in explanation of the usage of ἐπιτρέπεται here. “Cryptopoiesis” may satisfy some -- just as the “divine passive” satisfies some as an accounting for this usage. If the phrase here were ἐπετράπη, then perhaps it would be more obviously an equivalent of “I’ve given you license to speak.” I think that, for my part, I’d prefer to call this usage of ἐπιτρέπεταί σοι for ἑπιτρέπω σοι a periphrasis or circumlocution. Or call it “middle-passive of polite diction.” Just don’t call it an “aporetic middle-passive.”
οὔτοι ἀπ’ ἀρχῆς πάντα θεοὶ θνητοῖς ὑπέδειξαν,
ἀλλὰ χρόνῳ ζητέοντες ἐφευρίσκουσιν ἄμεινον. (Xenophanes, Fragment 16)

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
Alex Hopkins
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Re: Nuance in the passive voice

Post by Alex Hopkins »

I agree with Eeli and Carl that Acts 26:1 is not a case of hiding the agent. But I continue to wonder if there are studies where the hiding of the agent in Greek is discussed, so that Joan might set this text against a broader context?

Alex Hopkins
Melbourne, Australia
Mark Lightman
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Re: Nuance in the passive voice

Post by Mark Lightman »

Alex wrote:
Mark Lightman wrote,



Hiding the agent, also known as cryptopoiesis, is a feature of many languages besides Greek.


The term is new to me, Mark. Could you give further information on this, and particularly if it's been used with reference to Greek? I tried a Google search without luck.
Hi, Alex,

I invented the term about 20 hours ago. I'm hoping that Joan will make it famous. :)
Alex Hopkins
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Joined: June 10th, 2011, 7:15 am

Re: Nuance in the passive voice

Post by Alex Hopkins »

Mark wrote, re cryptopoiesis,
I invented the term about 20 hours ago. I'm hoping that Joan will make it famous.
I did wonder! 8-) And Joan, who was too modest in her post to the introduction forum to mention her second book, is just the right person to achieve your goal.

Personally, I appreciate the responses that have been made because it's been some years that I've tried to get Joan to be involved in the great community that is B-Greek.

Alex Hopkins
Melbourne, Australia
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