Frommedio- +passive.
mediopassive (notcomparable)
- (grammar) Pertaining to avoice of atransitiveverb that is bothmiddle voice andpassive voice orreflexive andpassive voice.
1989, Jon Philip Dayley,University of California publications in linguistics: volume 115,→ISBN:Whereas the function of the passive voice is to remove the agent from the discussion of a transitive activity, the function of themediopassive voice is to discuss an event in a way which explicitly denies the involvement of an initiating agent.
1990, Kazuhiko Yoshida,The Hittite Mediopassive Endings in -ri,→ISBN, page103:Until about 1900 the r-element attached tomediopassive 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.
in the mediopassive voice
mediopassive (pluralmediopassives)
- (grammar) A mediopassive construction; a phrase that uses the mediopassive voice.
2014, Antoinette Renouf, Andrew Kehoe,The Changing Face of Corpus Linguistics,→ISBN, page177: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 ofmediopassives with sell contain some kind of modification, namely 92.2%.
2014, Marianne Hundt,Late Modern English Syntax,→ISBN, page107:More importantly, it is highly context dependent: (a) certain text types (such as advertising copy) seem to license baremediopassives more than others (see Section 6.4.1), (b) contextually implied contrast may enable an inherent property reading of a baremediopassive (see Sections 6.4.2.1 and 6.4.2.2), or the verb itself might foster baremediopassive use (this seems to be the case with denominal verbs like zip, button, bolt, or clamp, see Goldberg and Ackerman 2001: 806).
grammatical voice in which the actor of a stative verb is not expressed
Mediopassive voice on Wikipedia.Wikipedia