The facilitative middle in Baltic and North Slavonic

Abstract

The article deals with the facilitative middle, a gram often simply referred to (especially in literature of the formal persuasion) as ‘the middle’ (e.g., The bread cuts easily). While in the Western European languages this gram is nearly exclusively generic or individual-level (kind-level) and has no explicit agent (these features are correspondingly often regarded as definitional for ‘middles’), the Baltic and Slavonic languages have constructions that arguably belong to the same gram-type but often represent stage-level predications, with a non-generic agent that is optionally expressed by an oblique noun phrase or prepositional phrase, or is contextually retrievable. The article gives an overview of the parameters of variation in the facilitative constructions of a number of Baltic and Slavonic languages (individual- or kind-level and stage-level readings, aspect, transitivity, expression of the agent, presence or absence of adverbial modifiers etc.). The semantics of the different varieties is discussed, as well as their lexical input. Attention is given to the grammaticalisation path and to what made the Balto-Slavonic type of facilitatives so markedly different from their counterparts in Western European languages.