Active versus middle perfect in Homeric Greek: synchrony and diachrony

While there is no doubt that the middle perfect stem is a secondary addition to the verbal system of Ancient Greek, the reasons for its creation beside the older active perfect are rarely discussed. On the one hand, it has been claimed that the middle perfect stem was first introduced in the pluperfect for morpholog-ical reasons, in order to supply the active perfect with a past tense (Chantraine 1927); on the other hand, it has been argued that the difference lies in the role of the subject (Daues 2006). In this contribution, we propose that active and middle perfects fulfilled two different derivational functions. Originally, the active per-fect transformed certain types of dynamic events into a state (not necessarily a resulting state) of the subject; the middle perfect was introduced to indicate the resulting state of the object with transitive verbs. Subsequently, the middle per-fect gradually replaced the active perfect with deponent verbs, but the active per-fect was left untouched in large parts of its original domain. Finally, we argue that the perfect stem transformed a complex predicate into a simple one