Unfortunately, that also means the game plays a bit like multiplayer solitaire at times. Knowing which gear to turn, from round to round and game to game, will allow you to get the most out of your territories. Cynthia Crossen, The Wall Street Journal, 21 Nov. The book reads like first-person reportage, and Defoe was a journalist as well as a novelist, but the book is set in 1665, when Defoe was only five years old. It's not overly extracted and dense, but smoky and sharp instead, with dark fruit notes casually wafting from the glass and not jumping out with reckless abandon. If you watch Top Chef, for example, you might hear the judges tell the contestants that their dish 'ate salty.' Similar constructions appear in reviews for wine, books, and video games:ĭespite the region's hot climate, the wine drinks with a surprising deftness.

You might be the one driving the car, but if you like the feel of it after the test, you might say 'The car drove smoothly.' The car wasn't the agent doing the driving-you were-but the sentence seems to comment on how well the car received the action of your driving it.įor this reason, the mediopassive turns up rather frequently in constructions employed by critics and writers tasked with judging or rating something. Say you're taking a car out for a test drive.

In the case of the mediopassive examples shown above, the action is being qualified (usually with an adverb or adverbial phrase) as though it is being evaluated as to how well the object responds to the action being performed on it. The noun alarm, in this case, is both the doer of the action in the first example and the receiver of the action in the second. The verbs are classified as ergative verbs, in which the objects of transitive verbs and subjects of intransitive verbs are typically marked by the same linguistic forms.Įrgative verbs tend to be discussed more in other languages, but some do turn up in English ('The alarm sounded' 'We sounded the alarm'). The definition implies that mediopassive voice demonstrates a shift of sorts in verb usage. In the dictionary, mediopassive voice is defined as 'a form or voice of a transitive verb which by origin is of the middle voice or is reflexive and shows by its meaning that it is developing toward passive use, or is used in both middle and passive meanings, or is used only in passive meanings.' Mediopassive voice is considered a form of middle voice, which asserts that a person or thing both performs and is affected by the action represented. The mediopassive is often employed by critics, in constructions like 'the dish ate salty.'

Passive voice vs active voice