A “Middle Voice” from the South

In the 2020 Prague Virtual Conference of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), Sharon Traweek was awarded the society’s John D. Bernal Prize jointly with Langdon Winner. The Bernal Prize is awarded annually to individuals who have made distinguished contributions to the field of STS. Prize recipients include founders of the field of STS, along with outstanding scholars who have devoted their careers to the understanding of the social dimensions of science and technology. This is a reflection on Traweek’s work on epistemic authority in relation to Kaleidos—Center for Interdisciplinary Ethnography in Ecuador.

Towards a typology of middle voice systems

The middle voice is a notoriously controversial typological notion. Building on previous work (e.g. Kemmer, Suzanne. 1993. The middle voice. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins), in this paper I propose a new working definition of middle markers as inherently polyfunctional constructions which are partly associated with valency change in opposition to bivalent (or more) verbs and partly lexically obligatory with monovalent verbs. Based on this definition, the paper undertakes a systematic survey of 149 middle voice constructions in a sample of 129 middle-marking languages. Evidence from the sample shows that middle voice systems display a much richer variation in forms and functions than is reported in the literature. This richer empirical evidence challenges some of the mainstream views on middle marking, especially its purported connection with reflexivity and grooming-type events, and calls for an overall rethinking of the typology of the middle voice.

The passive voice in ancient Indo-European languages: inflection, derivation, periphrastic verb forms

The IE languages developed different strategies for the encoding of the passive function. In some language branches, the middle voice extended to the passive function to varying extents. In addition, dedicated derivational formations arose in a number of languages, such as the Greek -ē-/-thē- aorist and the Indo-Aryan -ya-presents. Periphrastic formations involving a verbal adjective or a participle are also widely attested, and played an important role in the building of the passive paradigm in e.g. Romance and Germanic languages. As the periphrastic passive is also attested in Hittite alongside passive use of the middle, both strategies seem to be equally ancient. Some minor strategies include lexical passives and the extensive lability of verbs. A survey of possible strategies provides evidence for the rise of a disparate number of morphemes and constructions, and for their ongoing incorporation into the inflectional paradigms (paradigmaticization) of given languages, thus adding to our knowledge about cross-linguistic sources of passive morphology and grammaticalization processes involved.

Translating John 21:14 and its Significance

In John 21:14, two verbs are, from the viewpoint of syntax, in the passive voice. Do we face here a divine passive—the action of God in raising and revealing the dead Jesus but not explicitly stated as such? Or is this passive voice to be understood as ‘middle’ voice? Jesus inasmuch as he is divine performs the action (resurrection) and ‘receives’ the results of his action, the new risen life in which he appears. By ignoring the possibilities of middle voice, some translations miss the significance of ending John’s Gospel by proclaiming the active involvement of Jesus (as divine) in his own resurrection from the dead and appearance to the disciples—a belief already presented by the Fourth Gospel.

Subject autonomy marking in Macro-Tani and the typology of middle voice

Middle voice constructions are generally understood as syntactically detransitivizing and as semantically characterized by a “low degree of event elaboration” (in Kemmer’s terms) involving a relatively affected subject. Middle voice constructions thus characterized have been identified in several Trans-Himalayan (Sino-Tibetan) languages, in particular by LaPolla. In Macro-Tani languages, we find a seemingly cognate construction with a similar distribution; however, Macro-Tani middle-like constructions are not detransitivizing, and do not mark subject affectedness. Instead, their primary meaning appears to be one of highlighting subject autonomy: a heightened degree of autonomy, volition and/or responsibility over an action on the part of the clause subject. In this article, following an analysis of Macro-Tani subject autonomy marking, we will argue that its similarities to and differences from middle voice marking in other Trans-Himalayan languages is consistent with Zúñiga and Kittilä’s view of middle voice as a “network of meanings,” whose properties derive not from their reflection of a unified underlying cognitive category, but rather from a heterogeneous set of developments from similar diachronic source forms.

Bribri media tantum verbs and the rise of labile syntax

In this article, we first show that the Bribri (Chibchan) middle voice suffix -r derives passive voice from active transitive and agentive intransitive verbs, as well as anticausative verbs from nominal and adjectival roots. Second, we focus on five media tantum verbs, i.e., forms that synchronically carry the -r suffix and have no counterpart without -r. Unlike most other verbs, these five forms are labile, i.e., they can occur in syntactically intransitive and transitive constructions with no (supra-)segmental change. After describing the valence patterns in which Bribri media tantum labile (MTL) verbs occur, we investigate whether: (i) their non-absolutive arguments behave like ergative phrases; and whether (ii) MTL verb forms in two-argument constructions behave like active voice transitive verb stems. Third, we outline a hitherto unnoticed diachronic path for the rise of lability in a small subgroup of Bribri media tantum verbs.

Hearing the ‘Voice’ of the Niphal: A Response to Ellen van Wolde

This article responds to the innovative and stimulating research by Ellen van Wolde in a previous volume of Journal for the Study of the Old Testament. She claims that the Niphal is middle voice and can be passive, ‘if (and only if) an external argument, coded as an external Agent, is present’. My research however, demonstrates that such a description of the passive is both inadequate in view of the world’s languages and incongruent with Niphal. In addition, my response lays bare how such a prescription of the middle voice to the Niphal in the Hebrew Bible is circulus probando and unconvincing.

SICHÜBERLIEFERUNG: RE-MOVING THE HISTORY OF BEING AS PRESENCE

How are we to responsively belong to tradition? This paper retrieves the concept of self-tradition (Sichüberlieferung) in Heidegger’s magnum opus Being and Time (1927). We will take as a guiding light Heidegger’s designation of a mode of his phenomenology as “phenomenology of the inapparent” expressed in the 1973 Zähringen Seminar. We will pay special heed to the function of the middle voice, neutrality of Da-sein, and tautology in the question of Being and history and bring to light the relation between authentic temporality and authentic historicity in a tautological turning of the selfsame. We will make a remark on the delay of Da-sein’s authentic historicity in the light of the “self-tradition” which marks Heidegger’s non-metaphysical response to the heritage of metaphysics of presence. In the wake of the phenomenology of the inapparent, we will turn to Derrida’s 2008 text The Animal that Therefore I Am to explore Derrida’s different approach to free the “I am” from that of Heidegger’s Dasein whose being is set in Jeweilig-Jemeinigkeit. We will show how Derrida’s invention of animot enables him and us to speak with the voices of our non-human animal others and enables us to free ourselves from the fixities of presence of the present in our thought, language, and sensitivity. In a relay of the two philosophers’ reading of us and their ways of self-overcoming of man as rational animal, we will learn to be in question and to learn to relate to one another without reducing one to the other and other to the one.