Mehr als Passiv: über einige Verbalmorpheme in Altindogermanischen Sprachen

This paper deals with the controversial issue of the so-called “passive” verb morphology in Vedic and Greek and with its place within the system of diathetic oppositions. The label “passive aorists” is traditionally referred to morphemes which compete with the middle inflection in some constructions: in Greek, the -thē- /-ē- aorists, in Vedic, the (3rd person) i-aorist forms (with equivalents in Iranian). It is generally agreed that these forms are not exclusively passive, but, on the other hand, their non-passive use is not univocally definied. It is evident that these forms do not cover the whole syntactically “middle” domain (here understood as the class of structures in which the final Subject exhibits also Object properties: a notion first developed by Nunzio La Fauci on Latin and Romance data and applied to Greek and Indo-Iranian by Marina Benedetti and others). The separate investigation of Vedic and Greek data allows to determine contrastively the specific syntactic function of the so-called “passive” morphemes: they cover an area within the “middle” domain, which includes both passive and unaccusative constructions. By contrast, they do not occur in other kind of “middle” structures, such as reflexives, reciprocals, “antipassives” etc. It is claimed that the syntactic parameter [+/- multiattachment] is apt to determine the borderline between the class of structures which may host the “passive” morphemes and the class of structures which (though syntactically “middle”) may not host the “passive” morphemes (following Carol Rosen, Multiattachment is defined as the syntactic condition determined by the convergence of the functions Subject and Object on the same element at some syntactic level). The absence of a syntactic level with Multiattachment is the pertinent feature which opposes passive and unaccusative structures (where the so-called “passive” morphemes occur), to reflexives, reciprocals, “antipassives” etc. (where the so-called “passive” morphemes do not occur). Behind the etymological unrelatedness and other relevant differences, striking similarities in the distribution of the “passive” morphemes emerge in the comparison between Vedic and in Greek.