- •Grammar as a Constituent Part of Language System The Conception of Language. Language and Speech
- •The Basic Grammar Notions: Category, Meaning, Form and Function
- •The Dualistic Nature of Language Units
- •The Notion of Syntagmatic and Paradigmatic Relations
- •Language Levels and Their Basic Units.
- •The Basic Units of Morphology. The Theory of Oppositions The Word and its Basic Features
- •The Morpheme and the Morphemic Structure of the Word
- •The Theory of Oppositions
- •The Reduction of Oppositions
- •Lexico-Grammatical Classes of Words The Problem of Classifying Words
- •The Traditional Classification of Words
- •Adjectives
- •Notional and Functional Parts of Speech
- •The Field Structure of Parts of Speech
- •The Noun and Its Morphological Categories The Category of Number
- •The Problem of the Category of Case
- •The Category of Gender
- •The Article as a Noun Determiner
- •Some Theoretical Problems of English Adjectives and Adverbs The Category of Degrees of Comparison of Adjectives
- •The Syntactic Process of Substantivization of Adjectives
- •The “Stone Wall” Problem
- •The English Verb and Its Morphological Categories The Morphological Field of the Verb
- •The Category of Tense
- •The category of Aspect
- •The Category of Retrospective Coordination (perfect)
- •The Category of Mood
- •The Category of Voice
- •Reflexive Voice
- •The Reciprocal Voice
- •The Middle Voice
- •The Phrase Theory The Notion of the Phrase
- •Types of Syntactic Relations within a Phrase and Methods of Their Realization
- •Classification of Phrases
- •The Sentence Theory Simple Sentence as the Basic Unit of Syntax. The definition of the Sentence
- •Classification of Sentences
- •The Composite Sentence
- •Actual Division of the Sentence. Text Formation Based on the Actual Division of the Sentence
- •The Syntactic and Semantic Structures of the Sentence in Correlation
- •An Elementary Sentence and Its Modification in Speech Acts
- •The Text
- •Glossary
- •Литература
The Reciprocal Voice
Some authors speak of a special reciprocal voice, when treating such word-combinations as: greeted each other or praised one another.
We can treat this problem the same way as the problem of the reflexive voice, but we can say at once that the relations between the verb and the reciprocal pronoun are even looser than those between the verb and the reflexive pronoun.
1) First of all it seems quite possible that the reciprocal pronoun can be coordinated with some other noun or pronoun in the function of an object and so it has syntactic relations with the verb what is foreign to analytical forms.
e.g. They kissed each other and the child. They passed one another and all the guests. So the reciprocal pronoun can hardly be an auxiliary.
2) Besides, the verb can freely function without the reciprocal pronoun in the same meaning.
e.g. They kissed and felt into a lively talk. They smiled and parted.
3) Sometimes a reciprocal pronoun can be joined to the verb with a preposition which marks the syntactic relations between the verb and the pronoun what is foreign to analytical forms.
e.g. They smiled to each other.
The reciprocal pronoun does not change the meaning of the verb. So it seems logical to consider that “a verb + a reciprocal pronoun” is not an analytical verb-form of the reciprocal voice. It is a free word-combination, in which the verb takes an object expressed by a reciprocal pronoun.
The Middle Voice
Some authors speak of a special voice-form when comparing such sentences as:
I opened (1) the door and The door opened (2).
They say that in the 2nd sentence the verb is used in the middle voice. We can’t deny that though there is no difference between the verb-forms on the plane of expression, there is some difference between them on the plane of content. In sentences like “I opened the door” the subject is the doer of the action which is directed at some object. So it is a pure case of the Active Voice.
But in the sentence “The door opened” the Subject is not the doer of the action, it is sooner acted upon. So, on the plane of content it is close to the Passive Voice.
Taking into consideration the mixture of two principal voice-forms: active and passive in one verb-form, some scholars arrive at the conclusion that in the form like “opened (2)” we should speak of a special voice-form which they suggest calling “the middle voice”.
However it does not seem the best way out. Without a context the verb forms like “opened (1)” and “opened (2)” can not be opposed to each other, but without an opposition no morphological category can be established.
The difference between “opened (1)” and “opened (2)” is sooner of semantic nature and it can be revealed only on the syntactic level. The difference in the meaning happens to be caused by the lexical character of the verb, that is whether it is transitive, intransitive or medial. If the verbs are transitive the action of the verb is directed at some object which is an obligatory positional element for them. If the verb is intransitive it requires no object. Medial verbs, unlike both transitive and intransitive, don’t require an explicit member of the sentence, denoting the doer of the action or agent. It means that they can’t have any subject in the structure of the sentence, but the English declarative sentence structurally requires the presence of the Subject before the predicate the position of the subject is filled in by the object of the action. Thus, we can’t say “opened the door” in the meaning “открылась дверь”, so we say “the door opened”.
In such cases we can speak of using verbs of medial meaning. Medial verbs are a special type of transitive verbs which do not require any subject or agent.
However, we are to understand that transitive, intransitive and medial verbs are not necessarily different lexemes. There can be the same lexeme which can be used transitively, intransitively or medially in the Active Voice, influencing the structure of the sentence.
e.g. He stepped and broke the ice (transitive verb, active voice).
Many people broke in those conditions (intransitive verb, active voice).
The ice broke easily (medial verb, active voice).
Moreover, medial verbs can’t be used in the Passive voice, because they do not presuppose any doer of the action in the structure of the sentence, while Passive voice-forms do that.
Thus, speaking of the category of voice we can say that the English verb differentiates two morphological voice-forms – active and passive. Being of a general character, the active voice admits some variations in its principal meaning and that is reflected in the syntactic structure of the sentence. The most typical of such variations are the so-called Reflexive, Reciprocal and Middle Voice-forms.