mediopassive
nounEtymology From medio- + passive.
1
Grammar, Human sciences, Linguistics, Sciences 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 6.4.2.2), or the verb itself might foster bare mediopassive use (this seems to be the case with denominal verbs like zip, button, bolt, or clamp, see Goldberg and Ackerman 2001: 806).2014, Marianne Hundt, Late Modern English Syntax, →ISBN, page 107:
- Synonyms
- middle voice
- Derived terms
- medio-passivization