Rit (Vísindafélag Íslendinga) - 01.06.1970, Page 572
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To Gösta Holm: I should like to remark that I have at-
tempted to define the middle voice in purely formal terms, i.e.,
whenever a verb occurs with the -st ending I have called this
middle voice. This is, in my opinion, a most important
procedural point: before attempting to define voice in some
terms of meaning or function, an attempt must be made to
study the problem in formal terms only, and to discover
whether a syntactic explanation can be found for the
occurrence of the -st form. Eventually, this may, or will, lead
to some insight into its semantic aspects, insofar as we assume
that syntactic structures represent semantic constructs in
some systematic way. On the other hand, it is methodologically
quite valid to refer to the semantic interpretation of a sentence
where the -st form occurs as a reflexive, reciprocal, inchoative,
etc. I have limited myself in the present study to a search for
a syntactic common denominator for the middle-voice con-
structions. The problem that I cannot give an answer to as
yet is how we may predict when a syntactic form with -st
will have such or such a semantic reading.
As for the claim that sjö laxar veiddust af Bretum is gram-
matically well-formed, I can only reply that in my grammar,
and that of my informants, this is not an acceptable construc-
tion. If we form a statistical minority some explanation for
this discrepancy will surely be found.
To Michael Barnes: I am grateful for these examples, which
I had not previously noticed. Yet, they do appear to form a
very small, if not an anomalous, category in Icelandic syntax.
I am not at all sure that farast við is syntactically derived from
fara\ certainly there is no clearcut semantic identity. On the
other hand, as Mr. Barnes suggests, it seems plausible that
honum varð litið and honum talaðist derive from similar underlying
structures. In the case of the former, honum is indeed agental,
viz., the agent of the verb tala, but these form an embedded
sentence which is the subject complement of the higher
verb, verða. This subordinate position of the agent pronoun is
presumably distinguished in the surface structure by the