Talk:Voice (grammar)

message: I took Latin many years ago and vaguely recall that "to be born" is not active or passive voice, but something else. I was hoping to find something on this subject in this article, but alas, do not. Can anyone help? JKeck (talk) 05:10, 17 June 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: "to be born" is English -- are you looking for genus neutrum, deponens or commune, or for supine? -84.161.8.150 (talk) 09:03, 15 July 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  "To be born" 

message: This comment was inside the article, but IMHO that's a wrong place. If it's wrong, it shouldn't be inside the article. If it's doubtful, then it should be discussed here and not in the article. If it isn't wrong and if all doubts are cleared or if there are sources so one can ignore the doubts, then it should be re-inserted into the article.
I, Shinobu, commented out this section because "open" is an adjective. Compare in Dutch:
*De winkel is open.       - adjective       - The store is open.
*De winkel is geopend.    - static passive  - The store is open. Someone must have done it, but now it's just open.
*De winkel wordt geopend. - dynamic passive - Someone is opening the store, unlocking the door, turning the "open" sign and thus in the process of opening it.
This distinction is available in English through the use of the "be-passive" and the "got-passive", though this is not accepted by all speakers, and is considered colloquial or substandard in some circles:
*The store is open.         - adjective       - The store is open.
*The store is opened.       - static passive  - The store is open as someone has just opened the door.
*The store gets opened.     - dynamic passive - Someone opens the store by opening the door, unlocking the door, turning the "open" sign and thus in the process of opening it
- 84.161.8.150 (talk) 10:01, 15 July 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Comment 

message: I have no idea, where is the middle voice in Bengali. If anyone has any information about it, please give an example and source from which it has been taken.
Ashutosh Jha (talk) 11:15, 1 June 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Middle Voice in Bengali? 

message: Over the next few weeks, we'll be re-organizing the content & structure of this article to regularize the presentation of the datasets in according with the norms of how to format natural language data. — Preceding unsigned comment added by RM Dechaine (talk • contribs) 23:45, 21 October 2020 (UTC)
thread_title: Re-organization of content & structure

message: You have added lots of valuable material about voice in Mandarin and Japanese which by now already quite much dominates the article. This article is about grammatical voice as a general concept, and not a place for amassaing data about voice from various languages of the world. Examples from individual languages are certainly fine and helpful as long they serve to illustrate the gerenal concept. But all the details which you have added here are not even found in Mandarin grammar and Japanese syntax, where they actually belong. I'd strongly advice to add the material in those articles (and maybe in a later step create specialized sub-articles), and to trim it here to a reasonable minimum.  Your thoughts? –Austronesier (talk) 12:24, 18 December 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm delighted to see such detailed exposition of a grammatical topic! However, I do agree with Austronesier that this level of detail belongs to the individual grammar articles about each language (and the content can even be plausibly split into Grammatical voice in Chinese, etc.), with a summary replacing it here. I'm not sure that all of it needs to be summarised either – I don't know anything about Chinese, but the section based on Yip et al. for example, seems less about passive voice proper and more about disparate grammatical devices that achieve the same pragmatic function as does the actual passive in languages like English. For the time being, of course I don't see anything wrong with having that content here. Also, that's not just about the newly added Chinese and Japanese sections: the older section "Dynamic and static passive" contains rows of examples for various European languages, which we could very easily do without. – Uanfala (talk) 17:14, 19 December 2020 (UTC)
replies: text:  Thank you for the more detailed background information, I for my part agree with  that you can ahead first and build up your content on this page. We can think about moving it to other pages in a next step after your additions have been assessed by your instructor. Both of us of course cannot speak for other editors, who might see things differently. Though it's spilled milk now, to be on safe side, many class assignments make use of the "sandbox", where content can be built undisturbed with all the necessary trial-and-error, and only insert the complete material once into the main article. In any case, just give a sign when your project is finished. –Austronesier (talk) 20:34, 19 December 2020 (UTC)
replies: text:  Thank you for your understanding. We will let you know as soon as we receive our grade, which will most likely be sometime early in the new year. Happy Holidays! –300voice (talk) 10:59, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

text: Great, hope you got an A :) Come to think of it, as long as we don't have really a good idea about how to distribute the detailed language-specific material to other existing/new articles, we can just leave the page as it is for the time being. –Austronesier (talk) 19:50, 15 January 2021 (UTC)
replies: text:  Thanks for letting us know! Now that we are finished with the assignment we won't be checking this account very often so feel free to delete, edit or change whatever you see fit. Thanks again for your patience and understanding! –300voice (talk) 9:13, 16 January 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Chinese and Japanese 

message: There's no citation for the article's following assertion: "When the subject is the agent or doer of the action, the verb is in the active voice." The assertion qualifies as an ipse dixit. The assertion is especially troubling because it includes the words, "doer" and "action."  The definition therefore excludes  syntax with a subject (i.e. not a "doer") that entails a copula/stative verb  expressing a status (i.e. not an "action"). Although I agree that a sentence like "This is strange" doesn't qualify as active voice (despite some linguistic theory to the contrary), there remains a lack of a citation for the article's assertion corresponding to that observation. --Kent Dominic·(talk) 08:40, 25 January 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: Fixed. I could not find a source for middle voice, but that is cited in its own section. A sentence like "This is strange" is called an "anticipatory construction," evidently not in Wikipedia but cited in Crews, p.438.—Anita5192 (talk) 18:50, 25 January 2021 (UTC)
replies: text:  Your cite satisfies the Wikipedia criteria, but the article's assertion, as attributed to Crews, doesn't satisfy me. In my lexicon, "This is strange" constitutes neither active voice nor passive voice but stative voice. Don't bother googling the term; I coined it myself. On a separate note, you might want to re-examine your understanding of what anticipatory construction entails. (In my lexicon, it's termed a vicaritive pronoun. The term, "dummy pronoun," sounds too condescending for my tastes.) Cheers. --Kent Dominic·(talk) 00:48, 26 January 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Unsourced assertion 

message: I described some concerns I had with the tree diagram for "(8) The window broke from the pressure/by itself." in the[talk page for that image file]. Wanted to make sure I also brought them up here. In addition to what was said there, I want to note that the text given in (8) does not match the linearization in the tree, since (8) gives the (somewhat ambiguous) "from the pressure/by itself" chain.
I can't access the source of this 'adapted' tree, Alexiadou & Doron 2011. Do those authors actually construe the PPby as a complement of the agent-theta-role-bearing PP complement of Vbroke? I think another example should be drawn up to illustrate, because as is, this sentence misinforms a careful reader. anon:73.219.15.198 (talk) 18:45, 23 December 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Issue with tree diagram in "Middle voice"