In linguistics, a deponent verb is a verb that is active in meaning but takes its form from a different voice, most commonly the middle or passive. For the journal, see Linguistics (journal). ... It has been suggested that Verbal agreement be merged into this article or section. ... Voice, in grammar, is the relationship between the action or state expressed by a verb, and its arguments (subject, object, etc. ... For other uses, see Morphology. ... In grammar, the voice of a verb describes the relationship between the action (or state) that the verb expresses and the participants identified by its arguments (subject, object, etc. ... Voice, in grammar, is the relationship between the action or state expressed by a verb, and its arguments (subject, object, etc. ... In grammar, voice is the relationship between the action or state expressed by a verb, and its arguments (subject, object, etc. ...

Languages with deponent verbs

This list is not exhaustive.

• Greek has middle-voice deponents (some of which are very common) and some passive-voice deponents. An example in Greek is ερχομαι (erchomai, I come or I go), middle/passive in form but active in translation.
• Latin has passive-voice deponents, such as loqui ('to speak'), pati ('to endure'), sequi ('to follow'), and horatari ('to advise'). Additionally, four Latin verbs (audere, to dare; gaudere, to rejoice; solere, to be accustomed; and fidere, to trust) are called semi-deponent, because though they look passive in the perfect tenses, they are semantically active in all tenses.
• Swedish has a few passive-voice deponents, although interestingly, its closely related neighbour languages Danish and Norwegian mostly use active corresponding forms. Indeed, Norwegian shows the opposite trend: like in English, active verbs are sometimes used with a passive sense, such as in "boka solgte 1000 eksemplarer" ("the book sold 1000 copies").
• In Japanese, at first sight it might seem as though the passive voice can be used to increase the degree of politeness in a sentence, thereby establishing the existence of deponent verbs. However, it is merely by coincidence that the passive suffix corresponds exactly to a method of expressing politeness; Inoue Fumio's Nihongo Wocchingu notes that grammar texts dating from the Heian era list the four uses of the auxiliary -ru/-reru (which has become -reru/-rareru in modern Japanese) as indicating intransitivity, the potential mood (as distinct from the tentative mood), the passive voice, and honorifics.

For other uses, see Latin (disambiguation). ... The following text needs to be harmonized with text in the article History of Japan#Heian Period. ...

Deponency and tense

Some verbs are deponent universally, but other verbs are deponent only in certain tenses, or use deponent forms from different voices in different tenses. For example, the Greek verb ἀναβαίνω (anabaino) uses active forms in the imperfect active and aorist active, but in the future active it shows the middle form ἀναβήσομαι (anabesomai). The future active form might be predicted to be *ἀναβήσω (anabeso), but this form does not occur, because the verb is deponent in the future tense. The future forms that do occur have the same meaning and translation value that the active forms would have if they occurred. The imperfect tense, in the classical grammar of several Indo-European languages, denotes a past tense with an imperfective aspect. ... Aorist (from Greek αοριστος, indefinite) is a term used in certain Indo-European languages to refer to a particular grammatical tense and/or aspect. ... It has been suggested that Future perfect tense be merged into this article or section. ...

Peculiar issues in Greek

Koine Greek has a few verbs which have very different meanings in the active and middle/passive forms. For example, ἁπτω ('hapto') means "I catch fire," whereas its middle form ἁπτομαι ('haptomai') means "I touch." Because ἁπτομαι is much more common in usage, beginners often learn this form first and are tempted to assume that it is a deponent. Also, scholars have recently begun to debate whether deponency actually exists in Ancient Greek, or if it has been incorrectly assumed based on its existence in Latin. Verbs which are assumed to be deponent might simply always be used in the middle voice with middle meanings. As an example, the verb ἔρχομαι (to come or go) could be understood to be in the middle voice, as one always brings themself with when they come or go.^[1] The literal meaning of the Greek word koine (κοινή) is common. It is used in several senses: Koiné Greek (Κοινή Ἑλληνική), a Greek dialect that developed from the Attic dialect (of Athens) and became the spoken language of Greece at the time of the Empire of Alexander the Great. ...

Examples

• Swedish andas ("breathe", deponent), Danish and Norwegian Bokmål ånde ("breathe", non-deponent).
• Swedish hoppas ("hope", deponent), Danish håbe, Norwegian Bokmål håpe ("hope", non-deponent).

See also

• Defective verb

• See the Surrey Deponency website for a cross-linguistic survey of deponent phenomena

In linguistics, a defective verb is a verb with an incomplete conjugation. ...

Sources

• Greek example αναβησομαι (anabesomai) taken from the principal parts table in the appendix to Basics of Biblical Greek Grammar, William D. Mounce.

In language learning, the principal parts of a verb are the series of key forms which the student has to learn by heart in order to be able to conjugate the verb through all its forms. ...

References

1. ^ Long, Gary. Grammatical Concepts 101 for Biblical Greek. Hendrickson Publishers. 2006. ISBN 1-56563-406-3