© laura grestenberger,  | doi: ./- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Public License (cc-by-nc 4.0). Indo-European Linguistics  () – brill.com/ieul Reconstructing Proto-Indo-European Deponents Laura Grestenberger* Concordia University Laura.Grestenberger@concordia.ca Abstract This paper argues that the Proto-Indo-European voice system, despite undergoing sev- eral waves of morphological renewal on the way to the daughter languages (Jasanoff 2003), was typologically that of early ie languages like Vedic and Greek, and con- temporary languages such as Modern Greek, and that the syncretic voice systems of these languages share the property of having deponents. While previous discussions of middle-only verbs have focused on a few morphologically archaic but semantically unsurprising middles, I show that pie also had agentive, syntactically active middles that escaped the expected remodeling as formally active verbs and surface as depo- nents in the ie daughter branches. Reconstructing verbs with “unexpected” voice mor- phology may seem counter-intuitive, but is necessary to cover the empirical facts and may also serve as a diagnostic for the relative chronology of the morphological innova- tions that occurred in the domain of p ie voice morphology. Keywords deponents – voice morphology – middle voice – Vedic – Greek – Hittite – Latin * I would like to thank Hannes A. Fellner, Jay Jasanoff, Melanie Malzahn, Craig Melchert, Jeremy Rau and Michael Weiss for their criticism and comments on earlier versions of this paper and on chapter six of my dissertation (Grestenberger 2014a) on which it is based. I also want to thank the editors of Indo-European Linguistics and two anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions. The usual disclaimers apply.