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Part of
Historical Linguistics 2015: Selected papers from the 22nd International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Naples, 27-31 July 2015
Edited by Michela Cennamo and Claudia Fabrizio
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 348] 2019
► pp. 287–300

Chapter 14
Effecting a change

Perfect and middle in some Indo-European languages

The so-called “stative” endings correspond to the archaic middle endings, as they belong to the perfect and the middle voice. The contrast between perfect and middle conveys the contrast between the representation of a state resulting from a process and the representation of a process that causes a change of state. Both the perfect and the middle occur in unaccusative constructions, in which the subject, corresponding to the transitive object, is represented as an inactive participant, which represents the locus of the process. At this stage, the perfect and the middle are opposed to the active = [active] vs. [middle: perfect]. The morphological marking of tense applied first to the process representation, leaving the state representation unmarked. Therefore, it applied first to the active and middle forms, and affected the perfect only later. Consequently, the middle passed from the perfect system to the present/aorist system = [active: middle] vs. [perfect]. The idea that the middle is ancient in the perfect system but recent in the present/aorist system also accounts for the well-known fact that the ancient middle endings (the “stative” ones) have been mixed with the active endings: the ancient endings survive in the injunctive, in the past tenses and in the optative mood, following Andersen’s (2001) markedness hierarchy.

Keywords: stative endings, middle voice, perfect, Indo-European, language change
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The “stative” diathesis and its relationship with the middle and the perfect
  • 3.Middle and perfect
  • 4.Process vs. state: An archaic architecture
  • 5.From active vs. middle/perfect to active/middle vs. perfect
  • 6.External evidence
  • 7.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Published online: 10 September 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.348.14laz
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