Definitions
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- adjective grammar Of a
grammatical voice in which the actor of astative verb is not expressed. This is a special type ofpassive voice , which is the general phenomenon of the actor of a verb not being expressed.
Etymologies
Sorry, no etymologies found.
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Examples
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The Venetic verb is often cited by Indo-Europeanists as an example of a mediopassive relic in -r- with connections to Italic and Anatolian branches.
Archive 2010-07-01 2010
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The Venetic verb is often cited by Indo-Europeanists as an example of a mediopassive relic in -r- with connections to Italic and Anatolian branches.
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Second, I discovered my misunderstanding of ablaut in the mediopassive such that a Narten stem should display an accented, shortened vowel in the middle while a non-Narten stem should display zero-grade1 therefore, *h₁és-h₂or 'I sit' and *gʰu-h₂ór 'I spill', not **h₁ḗs-h₂or and **gʰeu-h₂ór.
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The author subsequently explains how the mediopassive category of Proto-Indo-European PIE verbs is used and then finally more crazy ideas are claimed: In PIE, as in many OV languages, there was no reflexive or reciprocal pronoun.
Archive 2008-03-01 2008
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Regardless, *swe is still reconstructable for PIE and it still demonstrates a reflexive sense throughout the entire family from Germanic to Indo-Iranian despite the coexistence of a mediopassive.
Archive 2008-03-01 2008
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It's not clear however how or why a language would adopt a suffix *-r ex nihilo specifically for the mediopassive and replace a former *-i.
Archive 2008-03-01 2008
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This is why many IEists bow to common sense and recognize that the r-mediopassive is the true archaicism here, hence 1ps mediopassive *-h₂ór.
Archive 2008-03-01 2008
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Personally, I'm pretty convinced that the mediopassive borrowed the endings from the 'perfect'.
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One need not have to think long and hard about how a reflexive word can used to good use even in a language with a mediopassive that often covers reflexive actions.
Archive 2008-03-01 2008
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Since Anatolian, Italic and Celtic share a mediopassive in *-r due to their geographic proximity to each other during their development in the PIE speech area, it's immediately clear why a language would expand the usage of the ending *-i seen in the active to the mediopassive by way of paradigmatic levelling.
Archive 2008-03-01 2008
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