1153: Passival Pt. 2 (Semantics) Feb 4, 2018

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Verbs in English are either active or passive, but occasionally there is a third option, because people are surprisingly good at making sense of gaps between grammar and meaning that don't always match apparently. What is sometimes know as the passival is a form of the middle voice which is passive in meaning but active in form, such as the awkward sounding 'the food is eating' (i.e. 'being eaten'), but also appear more colloquially, such as in "this book reads well". This is different than "this child reads well" because of course children have eyes and brains with which to read, while books do not. What makes this voice a middle voice is that the action is done by the recipient of said action—which is totally fine as either active or passive e.g. 'he shaved himself' an theoretically 'he was shaved by himself' respectively—but sentences in this form of the middle voice, such as also "the window breaks", is not something that can actually happen given the meaning of the words, even when the sentences are absolutely grammatical.
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