Il medio indoeuropeo: nascita e storia di una categoria

Quid est ‘Middle’? That is the problem. The aim of this dissertation is to inspect the origin and the history of the verbal category of Indo-European Middle, looking into different definitions of the term ‘middle’ and of the categorial uses in some IE languages. The terminological ambiguity is a characteristic feature of the label ‘middle’, therefore it was necessary to sketch a metalinguistic survey. The overview starts from the grammatical treatises by the Ancient Greek and Latin linguists (Apollonius Dyscolus, Dionysius Thrax, Priscianus, Macrobius) up to the latest typological studies about Middle Voice (Kemmer 1993) or Reflexives (Geniušienė 1987), through the discussion on the Indo-European Middle (Delbrück 1897, Wackernagel 1950, Benveniste 1966, Gonda 1960, Lazzeroni 1990, 2004 et alii). The statements of ancient grammarians are important to understand that the difficulty of defining the ‘middle category’ has been already present in the Greek metalinguistic tradition where the term ‘middle’ was born. The terminological misunderstanding was increased when the label has been extended into other linguistic systems, because it has been wrongly employed to describe further functions and historical data. The comparison between the ancient and the modern grammatical tradition points to define the historical extension of the category (i.e. if the IE Middle corresponds to Middle Voice or not), its origin (i.e. if it developed within the historical IE languages or it belonged to the categories on the Proto-Indo-European verbal system) and finally its fitting use of the term ‘middle’ (i.e. if it refers to Voice or Morphology or Semantics). To this sake, some parameters have been selected, such as ‘subjectivity’, referred to ‘coreferentiality’ and ‘affectedness’, and ‘intransitivity’. Both linguistic and contextual analysis are based on Ancient Greek, Hittite, Latin and Vedic data. Ancient Greek and Vedic have been selected because these languages developed the morphological categories of Middle Voice and Perfect, which were self-contained in their semantic function. Latin, despite the almost complete reorganization of its verbal system, preserves some semantic features, as well as formal one, going back to a common category of the Proto-Indo-European. Finally, Hittite and especially its verbal system played a key role in the reconstruction of the PIE language and cause a discussion about reconstructive hypothesis, allowing to clarify, as far as possible, the origin of the category of ‘Middle’. In order to analyse the aforementioned parameters and peculiar functions, selected some verbal classes have been examined: reflexive, anticausative, unaccusative, and experiential verbs. We conclude that the Middle Voice does not belong to the Proto-Indo-European language: it develops functionally and morphologically in the historical languages. We argue that the label ‘Middle Voice’ does not correspond to the IE Middle category. Finally, the Middle is a composite category collecting morphological configurations and peculiar syntactic constructions, each of which would require a finer terminology in order to describe more clearly the entire system.