# Active, middle, passive voices



## JulianStuart

I was not aware until recently that there even was a middle voice in English, until entangledbank pointed it out - and then some strange constructions began to make sense.  It was not taught when I was in school so perhaps it is not (always/ever) included when English is taught as a second language.  It has shown up in several questions recently -
finish
sell
bake
launch
so I thought it would be good to draw attention to it and to provide a collection of examples.

Is this something our "native" speakers were taught at school?  Is it common in classes for English as a second language?

Thanks
JS


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## IDK

I'm still going through the system, and I can say from experience that this "middle voice" is COMPLETELY new to me. You didn't miss anything. Relations of mine who learned English second in their home countries have never heard of this voice either.


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## entangledbank

Technically, there isn't. There are only two structures, active and passive. The 'middle' construction is active in form, but has a meaning equivalent to a passive. The 'middle' label is useful for pointing out this important feature of many English verbs, which needs a name, but it is not the same as in Ancient Greek (the origin of the term), which genuinely does have three voices, morphologically distinct.


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## Forero

_Finish_ is curious because we often say things like "I am finished" to mean something more like "I have finished", so the form, active or passive, seems completely divorced from the meaning and the sense has to be reached by knowing whether the subject is animate or inanimate (or something like that).

_Bake_, _cook_, _boil_, etc., are interesting in that in French, where they normally have the "passive" meaning, the "active" meaning has to be expressed with the equivalent of "make <something> bake/cook/boil/etc." I am curious which meaning was first in English (or Germanic).

We also say things like:

_The burgers they brought are ready to eat.
__The burgers they brought are ready for eating.

_The meaning is more like "ready to be eaten"/"ready for being eaten". The only reason this works in the case of _eat_/_eating_ is that we know burgers don't normally eat but get eaten. Still, we don't say:

_The burgers they brought will eat at lunchtime._


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## JuanEscritor

Yes, it really is important to distinguish _what aspect_ of English it is about which you are speaking; for example: grammar, morphology, syntax, semantics.

I am going to say that almost every language, if not all, have the same semantic categories.  This is logical when one considers that every language in the world is essentially capable of discussing any and every thing.  It also means, however, that to say a language has a certain category is a rather useless statement if not qualified by _what type_ of a category it is.

So, ask yourself this question: Is the English 'middle voice' syntactic? Grammatical?  Morphological? Or, semantic?

If it is only semantic, it is pretty meaningless to point out; but if the feature is some one of those other things, then that is of interest. 

Juan E.


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## JulianStuart

JuanEscritor said:


> So, ask yourself this question: Is the English 'middle voice' syntactic? Grammatical?  Morphological? Or, semantic?
> .



Welcome to the forum

Perhaps you could address the question you raise? 

This somewhat unusual, and largely untaught (?) verb form would benefit from a name



> The 'middle' construction is active in form, but has a meaning equivalent to a passive. The 'middle' label is useful for pointing out this important feature of many English verbs, which needs a name,



but it seems as though it technically isn't a "middle voice" in the true sense.


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## Thomas1

At first sight, it isn't visible _per se_, but you can discern in semantically. I think the concept may be sort of similar to the notion of grammatical cases in English. 





JulianStuart said:


> [...]
> Is this something our "native" speakers were taught at school?  Is it common in classes for English as a second language?[...]


Does English as a Foreign Language count too?


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## panjandrum

JulianStuart said:


> ...
> Is this something our "native" speakers were taught at school?
> ...


Very definitely not, in my case.
We were expected to absorb English grammar and good English by osmosis, not by teaching.


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## Jam on toast

Despite attending a grammar school where they drummed English grammar into our heads without mercy, there was never mention of verbs functioning like this. Only active and passive voice were mentioned.

I suppose teachers of English at schools are fairly curriculum driven and it's enough to convey passive and standard voices without risking confusion by deviating into really interesting things like this.

Following on entangledbank's comment that it's a feature of our language that needs a name, what description would be best?

As a very amateur foreign linguist I could well be miles out here, but the construction seems at first glance to convey a similar meaning to the reflexive verb construction in Latin-derived languages - would that be fair to say?


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## JulianStuart

Thomas1 said:


> At first sight, it isn't visible _per se_, but you can discern in semantically. I think the concept may be sort of similar to the notion of grammatical cases in English.


It takes a bit of searching - that's what got me started  Things like "The document is printing"  "When you click the re-calculate button, the result displays in the main window" and so on.


> Originally Posted by *JulianStuart*
> [...]
> Is this something our "native" speakers were taught at school?  Is it common in classes for English as a second language?[...]





Thomas1 said:


> Does English as a Foreign Language count too?


Not if it's your third language 
I didn't want to bring up the discussion about where the hyphens go in "classes for non native English speakers"


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## Loob

JulianStuart said:


> This somewhat unusual, and largely untaught (?) verb form would benefit from a name


I think it already has several

The one I'm most familiar with is "ergative verb" - see this Wiki article: 





> In linguistics, an *ergative verb* is a verb that can be either transitive or intransitive, and whose subject when intransitive corresponds to its direct object when transitive.
> [...]
> In English, most verbs can be used intransitively, but ordinarily this does not change the role of the subject; consider, for example, "He ate the soup" (transitive) and "He ate" (intransitive), where the only difference is that the latter does not specify what was eaten. By contrast, with an ergative verb the role of the subject changes; consider "it broke the window" (transitive) and "the window broke" (intransitive).


 
But here <eek> are some more options (Wiki again)





> When the subject of the intransitive form is a _patient_ (like the direct object of the transitive form), so that the verb aligns the syntactic roles _S_ and _O_, then the verb is known as an alternating ambitransitive, and the intransitive version is an unaccusative verb, like English _break_, _melt_ and _sink_. This means that the subject of the intransitive form corresponds with the direct object of the transitive version, so the roles are exchanged. Often depending on the linguist doing the research, the intransitive version of such a verb can be said to be in the middle voice, or to be an anticausative verb.


 


JulianStuart said:


> Is this something our "native" speakers were taught at school?


Good heavens, no.... I was at school far too long ago. And just at the time when progressive English teachers stopped teaching any sort of grammar


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## JulianStuart

Thank you for bringing clarity 

I would never have thought to search for unaccusative or anticausative (almost anagrammatical and certainly both new to me) and this is exactly the issue I am beginning to understand.  I do think I prefer "middle voice", even if some think it not quite right somehow, because it seems to straddle the active and passive in meaning.


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## entangledbank

Okay, I'm going to call W*k*p*dia on this one. This is right in the middle of my expertise in linguistics, and I've seen all the common terminology (at a pinch I could probably recall what unaccusative and unergative are, even at this hour of night); but I have never seen 'ergative verb' (ergative is a noun case) nor 'ambitransitive' nor 'anticausative'. This is typical W*k*p*dia obfuscation and pride of knowledge. It doesn't reflect actual usage among linguists — middle and middle voice are the common terms. I think we can also call them unaccusative.


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## Loob

Well, fine, etb: but I didn't actually _find_ 'ergative verb' in Wikipedia, although I quoted Wiki to describe it. I first came across it (to the best of my recollection) in Halliday's _An Introduction to Functional Grammar_.

My point was simply to respond to Julian's comment...


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## PaulQ

In support of Loob, the term "ergative/unergative" is mentioned in Ambitransitive verb - Wikipedia


> In fact, Dixon flat out rejects the use of the word ergative to describe such verbs, which was originated by Halladay's 1967 paper (q.v. Loob above) and propagated by Lyons' 1968 textbook, because the "ergativity" is contained entirely in the lexical unit and has no influence on a language's overall morphological or syntactic ergativity


However, at the level required to understand the concept, it is a useful term but there is also "middle".

A problem in linguistics is that an idea may have several elements and, depending upon how weight is given to those elements, be given a certain term. There seems to be no standardisation of these terms. (The imperfect tense or the simple continuous past or "the habitual past"? The pluperfect or the past perfect? A gerund, a participle or the -ing form?): until there is an equivalent decisive authority of, for example, Chemistry's International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), such Lilliputian arguments will continue and students will be confused.


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## sound shift

JulianStuart said:


> I was not aware until recently that there even was a middle voice in English.
> 
> Is this something our "native" speakers were taught at school?  Is it common in classes for English as a second language?


I was not taught about this at school. Neither "middle voice" nor "ergative verb" passed the lips of a teacher. I was involved with EFL for a while, but I was unaware of this phenomenon. In fact I first heard of it from an unimpeachable source: WordReference Forums.


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## DonnyB

I wasn't taught about a "middle voice" at grammar school, nor do I have any recollection of coming across the term until now, in fact.  

On the other hand I certainly can't set myself up as a reliable source of information about it, because many if not most of the terms learners come up with as having been taught are completely foreign to me, "ergative verbs" being a case in point.  .


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## Ivan_I

How one can see that *a middle voice* should be used? For example,

The books are selling well.
or 
The books are being sold well.


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## grassy

The second sentence means "someone is selling the books well", which is an unlikely thing to say.


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## PaulQ

Ivan_I said:


> How one can see that *a middle voice* should be (is being?) used? For example,
> 
> The books are selling well./The books sold/sell well
> The books are being sold well. /the books are sold well.


In 1. we know that books do not sell things and an object cannot be added (although, often,  a reflexive complement can.)
2. is clearly a passive form and an agent, e.g. "by this shop" can be added.


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## Ivan_I

Yeah, but on the other hand books can't sell themselves without anyone selling them...


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## Ivan_I

PaulQ, what didn't you like in my sentence?

How one can see that *a middle voice* *should be* (*is being*?) *used*? For example,


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## PaulQ

I was guessing what you meant - 
_How one can see that a middle voice should be used?_ - This is not a well formed question. It seems to ask "In a sentence, how is it possible to detect when the middle voice *must *be used?" To which the answer is "It probably depends what you want the sentence to mean."

_How one can see that a middle voice is being used? -_> "In a sentence, how do you know that the verb is in the middle voice?" -> I thought that this was what you were asking.


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## natkretep

Ivan_I said:


> Yeah, but on the other hand books can't sell themselves without anyone selling them...


That is true, but sentence (1) is idiomatic and (2) isn't. This 'middle voice' construction with the verb used intransitively is normal with 'well'. The essay reads well. The wine drinks well. The steak cooks well under a grill.


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## Forero

How well books sell (how easy they are to sell or how quickly they get sold) is just not the same thing as how well books are sold (how completely they sell? how good the sellers are?).


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## Delvo

I was never taught that things such as the examples you're talking about were called "middle voice". I first encountered the concept of a middle voice when reading about other languages, not English, and it was in my hobby reading, not part of schoolwork.

The description that I've always known for such verbs is that they're sometimes transitive and sometimes intransitive, simply depending on whether an object is present.


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## loviii

Forero said:


> _The burgers they brought will eat at lunchtime._





natkretep said:


> The wine drinks well.


Can we say:
_The burgers they brought will eat well._

Thanks!


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## natkretep

I think the construction works better in relation to an ingredient, or if you emphasise how it is eaten - _eg_ pulled pork eats well with a barbecue sauce.


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## loviii

At this moment, one of the conclusions I've made from this thread is:
_The wine drinks well_. - correct
_Pulled pork eats well with a barbecue sauce_. - correct
_The burgers they brought will eat well_. - no clear answer
_The burgers they brought will eat at lunchtime_. - incorrect

To me, all these sentences are analogous to each other. Could you tell why the first two are correct while the forth is not? That is, by what logic can I divide the sentences into correct and incorrect?

Thanks!


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## Delvo

It's really best to just avoid doing this with "eat" or "drink". It's rather uncommon... even almost unnatural & jarring. I've never encountered it in real life. The one setting in which I've encountered this use of "eat" was in a series of commercials on TV at least three decades ago, and the one time I encountered this use of "drink" was in a movie about of couple of wine snobs being snobbish about wine a couple of decades ago. In both cases it stood out from normal English that real people really speak, enough to still be remembered all that time later for how strange it was. If I were to read it in a novel, I'd take it as a sign that the author is trying too hard to give his/her characters a unique signature sound, making it feel unreal and overwritten/overscripted.


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## TheMahiMahi

I really think it isn't such a good idea to call this whole thing a "voice" issue because then people will try to use it productively like "the burger eats well" which just doesn't work.

When we say "the books sold well" we aren't using some strange voice construction, this is simply another definition of the word "sell." Usually "sell" means "to give in exchange for something of value," but it also has another more specific _intransitive _meaning which is "to achieve a sale." Hence, "the books sold well." As far as I can tell there is no such "middle voice" construction anywhere in English.


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## Ivan_I

TheMahiMahi said:


> I really think it isn't such a good idea to call this whole thing a "voice"


Are you a professional grammarian?


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## tunaafi

Delvo said:


> It's really best to just avoid doing this with "eat" or "drink". It's rather uncommon... even almost unnatural & jarring.





TheMahiMahi said:


> I really think it isn't such a good idea to call this whole thing a "voice" issue because then people will try to use it productively like "the burger eats well" which just doesn't work.



I agree.


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## Ivan_I

I don't think it really matters who agrees or who doesn't because this notion already exists and can't be erased.


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## tunaafi

Which notion are you talking about? The fact that some English verbs convey a very similar idea with both an intransitive and a transitive (passive) form, or that some writers use the labels _middle voice_ or_ ergative voice_ when referring to this phenomenon?


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## Ivan_I

These are the notions I am talking about


tunaafi said:


> _middle voice_ or_ ergative voice_


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## tunaafi

Well, there is no doubt that middle voice and ergative case are grammatical features of some languages. I think that one of the things being discussed in this thread us whether the labels _ergative verbs_ and_ middle voice_ are useful/valid for English.

In my own work on verbs, I have found the term _ergative verb_ a useful shorthand for verbs that can be used in this way, but I do not find the labels have any value when helping people communicate in English..


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## Ivan_I

OK. But if you get rid of them what notions would you provide instead? I think the notions are very useful as they label a certain phenomenon and without them it would be hard to put one's finger on the problem.


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## Loob

If they're useful for you, then that's fine, Ivan.


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## PaulQ

loviii said:


> That is, by what logic can I divide the sentences into correct and incorrect?


It may be worthwhile considering the functions of “to sell” in the following:
1.       *The shop sells* – _“After being on the market for 3 years, the shop sells.”_ -> Intransitive: The shop enters a state of/becomes “sold”. Compare with the passive “The shop is sold.”
2.       *The shop sells to a businessman* = a businessman buys the shop – Compare with the passive _“The shop is sold to a businessman [by the owner]” in which “To a businessman [by the owner]”_ are both acting adverbially. (Compare “The shop sells well(adv.)”)
3.       *The shop sells* – _“What does the shop do?” “It sells.”_ -> In the intransitive form, the shop does the action of the verb in a general/non-specific manner.
4.       *The shop sells books *–> the shop does the action of the verb towards the books and they receive the action of the verb.
5.       *The shop sells itself *by giving special offers –> the shop encourages sales by giving special offers.


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## TheMahiMahi

Ivan_I said:


> OK. But if you get rid of them what notions would you provide instead? I think the notions are very useful as they label a certain phenomenon and without them it would be hard to put one's finger on the problem.



If it helps you to think of them that way then that's ok. But because this phenomenon does not hold true for all verbs (e.g. "the burger eats well") it actually becomes more confusing to refer to it as some kind of _rule_. In actuality, this phenomenon is built into the meaning of certain words like "sell" or "cook."

"The turkey *cooked *in the oven while Maria washed her hands." - This is not a "middle voice" construction of "cook," it is simply the _intransitive_ definition of the word. Some words (like *eat*) do not _have_ this intransitive meaning, therefore "the burger eats well" is incorrect.

"The turkey *was cooked* in the oven..." - This is a true passive voice construction, because the passive meaning is not coming from the word "cook," it's coming from "was." What I mean to say is, you can apply this formula to other verbs and get passive meanings from them, but you can't do that in your examples for "sell"


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## loviii

Forero said:


> The burgers they brought are ready to eat.


Is the verb "_eat_" intransitive here?

Thanks!


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## bennymix

I had not heard of 'middle' before frequenting this forum and its references and citations.

Cambridge Grammar {CGE}  of Carter and McCarthy doesn't seem to talk about 'middle' but has a paragraph on verbs* that acquire a meaning similar to passive voice.  _This picture is dark. It needs restoring.

*deserve, need, require..._


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## grassy

> The burgers they brought are ready to eat.





loviii said:


> Is the verb "_eat_" intransitive here?
> 
> Thanks!


The object of 'eat' is 'burgers', so it's not intransitive.


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## loviii

grassy said:


> The burgers they brought are ready to eat.
> 
> 
> 
> The object of 'eat' is 'burgers', so it's not intransitive.
Click to expand...

Is the next equality right?
_The burgers they brought are __ready to eat_. = _The burgers they brought are __ready to be eaten_.

Thanks!


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## tunaafi

Yes.


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## Forero

loviii said:


> Is the next equality right?
> _The burgers they brought are __ready to eat_. = _The burgers they brought are __ready to be eaten_.
> 
> Thanks!


Not exactly. The two sentences are similar in meaning but very different grammatically. "To eat" in the first sentence is active voice and the first sentence means that the burgers are ready for somebody to eat, but "to be eaten" is passive voice and the second sentence means that the burgers are ready to be eaten by somebody, not that they are ready for somebody to be eaten.

"The burgers are cooking" is a normal sentence, but "the burgers are eating" would be bizarre.


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## Ivan_I

TheMahiMahi said:


> "The turkey *cooked *in the oven while Maria washed her hands." - This is not a "middle voice" construction of "cook," it is simply the _intransitive_ definition of the word. Some words (like *eat*) do not _have_ this intransitive meaning, therefore "the burger eats well" is incorrect.
> 
> "The turkey *was cooked* in the oven..." - This is a true passive voice construction, because the passive meaning is not coming from the word "cook," it's coming from "was." What I mean to say is, you can apply this formula to other verbs and get passive meanings from them, but you can't do that in your examples for "sell"



I gather that "The books sell well" and "The books are (being) sold well" have different meanings. And I think I know them. But is there a difference in meaning between:  a The turkey *cooked *in the oven while Maria washed her hands. - b The turkey *was cooked* in the oven while Maria washed her hands. ????


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## velisarius

Yes -- (b) implies that the turkey was cooked (by somebody) in the few minutes that it took for Maria to wash her hands, or that Maria took three or four hours to wash her hands.


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