Whether they were traces of an ancient merger or just an economical tool for expressing the lack of interest in speaking about the Agent, the non-active Latin forms – otherwise called “medio-passive” – constitute another example of how interpretations governed by the grammar of contemporary languages can lead to an inappropriate description of a dead language. If there has been no much discussion about the interpretation of the active voice, the forms in -R have been subjected to a variety of interpretations mostly guided by translations in a specific contemporary language. One might think that looking for an invariant semantic feature capable of explaining all these derived values, contextually determined by the verbal stem, is an exercise in futility. However, in our opinion, it is at least worth trying to find a link between all these multiple functions encoded in a single morphemic paradigm. But before presenting our arguments in favor of a unifying discourse model, we shall examine the positive trends as well as the weaknesses of a few models of the category of voice in general, and of Romance voice in particular [If there seems to be a consensus about the fact that the term diathesis corresponds to the semantic area expressed by voices (a universal feature of language), the definition of voice as a grammatical category (language specific) is not without its controversial aspects].
The citations/references list is based on indexed publications only, and may therefore be incomplete. For any and all inquiries related to the database, please contact us at [Please enable javascript to view.].
pdf 
html 
