The Diathesis: Concept, form and uses in the Romance languages

The characterisation of Proto-Indo-European as a synthetic language, where the semantic features of the performance of the process within the same agent/causer (or at least in a background narrowly related to it) is morphologically materialised by the use of various verbal affixes, clearly distinguishable, enhances the idea that the voice (sic), even in the mother of all modern Romance languages, was a fully outstanding concept: active (in the cases of an outer agent together with a Ø morpheme) and middle (in the opposite case and with a -r morpheme) (Benveniste 1966).

Its further evolution, from Latin to the different Romances, of a set of varied features mainly analytic-based will cause the question about the current relevance/importance of the voice as a grammatical category to arise: is it still possible to treat about voices? And if it is, how could it be (re)defined and with which uses and forms should it be manifested?

Keywords: Diathesis, voice, verbal category, active, passive, middle, ergative, impersonal.