Rit (Vísindafélag Íslendinga) - 01.06.1970, Page 555
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Textbook grammars of Icelandic do not give any single
definition of the function of the middle-voice ending -st, but
suggest that it is a variant of the reflexive or expresses reci-
procality, as in Hann klæddist ‘He dressed (himself)’ or Þeir
mœttust ‘They met (each other)’. In other instances the use
of the middle voice seems to be somewhat synonymous with
the passive, Bókin fannst and Bókin var fundin; both translate
into English as the agentless ‘The book was found’, except
that the middle voice implies, not ‘was’, but ‘became’ or ‘got
to be’. In other words, whereas the Verb Phrase (VP) in the
passive is stative, in the middle voice it is non-stative (on
defining the feature stative, see, e.g., Lakoff 1965 and Bach
1968). But none of these descriptions will account for the
occurrence of the -st ending in such sentences as Ég vonast til að
fara ‘I hope to go’, Honum finnst málið auðleyst ‘He finds the
problem easy to solve’, Glasið fylltist ‘The glass filled’. If we
are to attempt an explicit definition of the notion of middle
voice and attempt to discover whether or not these various
and apparently disparate sentences are in fact related by some
abstract common denominator it is much more promising to
attempt to do so in terms of a formal syntactic analysis of
their possible underlying structures rather than by vaguely
classifying them in terms of their synonymity with more
explicitly defined sentence structures. If, in fact, we can
discover a common syntactic source for the various instances
of the -st verb forms, this may eventually relate to some ab-
stract semantic processes which will allow us to talk about the
various ‘meanings’ of these sentences (where the verb, in the
middle voice, is, e.g., passive, reflexive, reciprocal, or incho-
ative in meaning).
2. Let us begin by considering the relationship of active,
passive, and middle voice in such sentences as Hannfann bókina
‘He found the book’, Bókin varfundin (afhonum) ‘The book was
found (by him)’, and Bókin fannst ‘The book was found, came
to be found’, where the passive sentence can freely occur with