Language Change and the Passive Voice

Indo-European verbs inflected in the middle voice have taken on passive meaning; explanations for this have been proposed, but each presents difficulties. Here an alternative paradigm of language change is set forth to explain the process. This paradigm is, among other things, dependent on the fact that more than one structural description may be assigned to a given sentence. If the hearer assigns a different structural description to a sentence than the speaker does, and if a rule based on this 'deviant' structural description spreads, then the language exhibits change. Under certain circumstances, then, agentless OV constructions may be mis-assigned the constituent structure of a passive SV construction-where the object of the active, transitive sentence is interpreted as the subject of its passive, intransitive counterpart.