Verb – Aorist passive singular

ObjectivesLearning objectives

• The meaning of passive voice
• The morphology of Aorist Passive sg verbs
• The syntax and semantics of the passive voice

VocabularyVocabulary

NoteGeneral Greek: Voice 3 (passive; passive deponent; historical meaning)

We introduced voice as a syntactic category that appears on the verb and modifies the subject in some way (see 7.1.3). When there is a corresponding active form of a verb, using the medio-passive instead normally involves deletion or suppression of the original subject in the active sentence. The hallmark of the passive voice is that what would be the subject in the active voice is still present syntactically but is not explicitly given phonologically. In other words, it is not pronounced. The subject is “suppressed” but not entirely absent because it is still present semantically. The reason why we know it is still there in the passive voice is because we can reintroduce the agent with a ‘by-phrase’ as in The disciple was taught by the teacher.

Medio-passive deponents are medio-passive verbs without a corresponding active form (see 8.2.3), but there are also passive deponents, or verbs that have a passive form but no corresponding middle or active. Like medio-passive deponents, passive deponents exhibit a range of meanings despite belonging to the same morphological class (see Syntax B for a fuller discussion on verb meaning and voice).

GrammarGrammar Topic: Verb – Aorist passive singular

The Greek verbal system normally lumps middle and passive into one category (hence the Luo medio-passive), but the Aorist indicative is different in that it marks middle and passive differently.

MorphologyMorphology: Verb – Aorist passive singular

• The Aorist psv endings begin with -θη, Greek’s marker for psv voice
• Be careful: The 1s ends with a ν, while the 3s ends without its characteristic moveable ν

SyntaxSyntax-Semantics: Verb – Passive (1 – Subject affected)

Verb – Passive: all 4 parts on one page →Also in Lesson 18.1, Lesson 35.2, Lesson 37.1

While we have said that voice is a syntactic category and not a semantic one, the passive voice does still correlate with certain meanings. Objects in active sentences are often affected by the event of the verb in some way, so subjects in passive sentences (which are the original objects in the active sentence) are also normally affected by the event of the verb. This is why the passive voice is called “passive” – the subject is passive in the sentence. While the subject is not always truly passive, it is indeed almost always affected in some way.

The active verb λύω normally takes a subject that is actively untying something, and the object is the thing that is untied. In the passive, the thing untied (that is, the thing affected) becomes the grammatical subject, the ‘bond of his tongue’ in the below example: