mediopassive
mediopassive adjective: pertaining to a voice of a transitive verb that is both middle voice and passive voice or reflexive and passive voice.
Adjective
mediopassive (not comparable)
- Pertaining to a voice of a transitive verb that is both middle voice and passive voice or reflexive and passive voice.
- Whereas the function of the passive voice is to remove the agent from the discussion of a transitive activity, the function of the mediopassive voice is to discuss an event in a way which explicitly denies the involvement of an initiating agent.1989, Jon Philip Dayley, University of California publications in linguistics: volume 115, →ISBN
- Until about 1900 the r-element attached to mediopassive endings was merely regarded as a marginal feature peculiar to Halo-Celtic; it was taken as evidence for Italo-Celtic because it was supposed to be an innovation of these two groups.1990, Kazuhiko Yoshida, The Hittite Mediopassive Endings in -ri, →ISBN, page 103
Noun
mediopassive (plural mediopassives)
- A mediopassive construction; a phrase that uses the mediopassive voice.
- A systematic study of mediopassive sell in the BNC (Figure 6) confirms that – at least for this verb – the constraint seems to hold: the vast majority of mediopassives with sell contain some kind of modification, namely 92.2%.2014, Antoinette Renouf, Andrew Kehoe, The Changing Face of Corpus Linguistics, →ISBN, page 177
- More importantly, it is highly context dependent: (a) certain text types (such as advertising copy) seem to license bare mediopassives more than others (see Section 6.4.1), (b) contextually implied contrast may enable an inherent property reading of a bare mediopassive (see Sections 6.4.2.1 and...2014, Marianne Hundt, Late Modern English Syntax, →ISBN, page 107
- Synonyms:
- middle voice
Synonyms of mediopassive
Forms of mediopassive
| Adjective | |
|---|---|
| alternative form | medio-passive |
| Noun | |
| plural | mediopassives |
Origin of mediopassive
From medio- + passive.
Words formed from mediopassive
Questions about mediopassive
- What does mediopassive mean?
- Mediopassive means pertaining to a voice of a transitive verb that is both middle voice and passive voice or reflexive and passive voice.
- What part of speech is mediopassive?
- Mediopassive can be an adjective or a noun.
Words near mediopassive in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: mediopassive (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Cite this entry: “mediopassive.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/mediopassive. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.