Clearly, Marie, you have not been to New Hampshire recently. It is snowing and
temperatures should drop into the teens tonight.
--- Mari Broman Olsen wrote:
As a teaser (and link to previous discussions about the middle), I can
offer that Hopper and Thompson's article on "Transitivity in grammar
and discourse" notes that the negative tends to co-vary with
INtransitivity in languages. That is, in languages that mark
(in)transitivity and negatives morphologically, syntactically, or
semantically (that's a hard one to explain in a short msg, but they
include it), negatives, if they co-vary regularly with transitivity,
will appear with the intransitive morphological marking.
--- end of quoted material ---
You have raised an interesting point about the link between negatives and
intransitivity. Since Greek doesn't mark transitivity or negation
morphologically, Hopper and Thompson's generalization isn't directly relevant.
Even so, their proposal has obviously set a few bells ringing for you. Would
you be willing to say more about what you have in mind, even if it is
tentative?
Lindsay