The N-stem in ugaritic: Formal, semantic, and historical considerations

The present paper maps out the formal and functional properties of the Ugaritic N-stem in relation to other Ugaritic non-active constructions, specifically the G stative, Gpass, and Gt. The N-stem operates as a middle voice, promoting the semantic Patient to the syntactic position of subject and deriving “inchoative” verbs from stative roots, unaccusatives from dynamic roots of motion and change, and anticausatives, reciprocals, and (medio)-passives from dynamic transitive roots. In prose N-verbs are in general more frequent, and the forms of the SC are in particular more numerous, than in poetry. An explicitly “prosaic” usage of the N-stem is a (medio-)passive; on the contrary, the reciprocal usage is characteristically “poetic.” The latter phenomenon is explained in terms of the contact with Akkadian.