A Cognitive Study Of The Middle Construction In English And Chinese

This thesis is a cognitive study of the English and Chinese middle construction within the theoretical framework of Construction Grammar. The general semantic and syntactic properties of the English and Chinese middle construction are examined before a comparison between EMC and CMC is conducted. Furthermore, the motivations to the middle constructions have been explored.It is argued in this thesis that middle is a cross-linguistic phenomenon that bears universal properties but realized in different semantic and syntactic representations.And EMC and CMC are the instances of the syntactic representation of their semantic properties. The EMC and CMC share common core properties of middles:Semantically, it has a non-eventive, generic and a modal reading. Syntactically, it is active in form but has a passive reading with an implicit external argument. The subject predicate is usually attached to a modifier or modal words to achieve the acceptability of the middle sentences.The differences between EMC and CMC are more significant:CMC is proved to be more productive than EMC in several aspects: more variations of middle types, less constraints, more tolerant to the adjunct middles, etc.The thesis goes further to explore the motivations to EMC and CMC formation and meaning construal. It is proposed that the property inheritance from related constructions and metonymic coercion motivates the EMC and CMC formation and meaning construal.The thesis consists of seven parts:The first part provides a brief introduction to the scope of the inquiry, objectives of the study, methods employed, proposals and the organizations of the thesis.The second part is a brief literature review of the generative work.The third part briefly introduced the theoretical framework and theory adopted, i.e. the construction grammar and metonymy.The fourth part employs construction grammar framework to examine the properties of EMC, semantic constraints on EMC, then investigates the motivations to EMC and CMC from the perspective of metonymy and construction grammar.The fifth part is a construction grammar analysis to CMC. The taxonomy of middles in Chinese, the semantic and syntactic properties and semantic constraints are studied.The sixth part is a comparison between EMC and CMC in several aspects.And the last part is the concluding part that summarizes the previous chapters and states the remaining questions for further research.