In the Middle of Passive: Middle Voice in Modern Greek vs. Passive Voice in English
The Passive Construction has been the focus of many studies in Generative Grammar that gave rise to great discoveries (Chomsky 1957, Bach 1980, Roberts 1987) and yet there is no decisive analysis of the syntax and semantics of the Passive construction (cf. Baker, Johnson Roberts 1989, Collins 2005, Legate 2009, Bruening 2013) A further complication is that in many languages, the same morphology used for a prototypical passive construction is also used in structures that lack a passive meaning like verbal reflexives and reciprocals as well as anticausatives which have been analyzed as lacking an implicit agent. An example of such a language is Modern Greek (henceforth Greek) As it is illustrated below, the same morphology is used for a prototypical passive (1) for a verbal reflexive (2) and for an anticausative (3) (see Alexiadou Anagnostopoulou (2004) and references therein)