Book Description

This is yet another investigation of grammatical voice in Classical Greek, but this time with a twist and a chaser. It will be based on empirical evidence collected from 44 original Classical Greek texts by 15 different authors. As such, the results of this investigation could not be any clearer: after decades of intensive research by generations of modern linguists, no one has even come close to scratching the surface of grammatical voice in Classical Greek. This is particularly disappointing, since Classical Greek was the very first language for which the category grammatical voice was established and one would expect this language, among all others, to be the most researched. It is furthermore rather disappointing that, as far as we can determine, not a single modern linguist has ever actually read what Thrax wrote about grammatical voice in Classical Greek, what the later Greek grammarians wrote, much of which represented commentaries on Thrax, and what the Roman grammarians wrote about grammatical voice in Latin. Our investigation revealed at least 6 distinct morphological means of expressing grammatical voice as well as numerous ways grammatical voice is combined and exploited in Classical Greek. But perhaps the most important result of our investigation was the discovery of 24 distinct grammatical expressions (syntactic constructions) that can have the sense of the passive, 9 of which were main clause constructions, 11 were subordinate clause constructions and 4 were nominalizations. More interesting was the discovery that in 14 of these expressions grammatical voice was morphologically expressed twice. Yet, there is no empirically valid evidence nor scientifically and logically sound argument that could possibly support the contention of their being passive morphology in the Classical Greek language.