A Comparative Study On "AFPM" Construction Between English And Chinese

"Active form with passive meaning (AFPM) " construction has attracted much attention of English and Chinese scholars. Some problems have been found. One type of "AFPM" construction, namely "middle construction", is mainly studied and other types that also form this category are overlooked. The derivations of "middle construction" are still disputed. Some other studies that make relevant individual observations on the "AFPM" construction cause an incomprehensive understanding. Also, there is almost no comparative study on English and Chinese "AFPM" construction in the area of syntax.Therefore, the purpose of this thesis is to systematically make a comparative study on English and Chinese "AFPM" constructions and is to examine the "middle construction" from a new perspective. Meanwhile, through the method of comparison, this thesis is to describe, analyze and interpret the similarities and differences of English and Chinese "AFPM" construction. Moreover, the constraints that are implied will be summarized and interpreted. During the process of the comparative study, this thesis will make a full use of the general theories of contrastive linguistics, structuralism and Chomsky's T-G grammar.On the whole, a comparative classification is made on English and Chinese "AFPM" constructions. According to syntactic and semantic properties, it is divided into general "AFPM" construction and special "AFPM" construction. The major focus of this research, therefore, has been to attempt to compare two types of the "AFPM" constructions. Firstly, applying theories such as binding, PRO, movement, a comparative study is made on the general "AFPM" construction concerning the syntactic and semantic properties of the sentence elements (the subject, the predicate and the modifier). Different from the previous studies, NP+VP+ADJ is also assumed to be a "middle construction". NP+VP+ADV and NP+VP+ADJ in English and Chinese general "AFPM" constructions are proposed on a constraint.Secondly, the special "AFPM" construction is also carefully examined concerning the subject and the predicate. Some of English and Chinese special "AFPM" constructions are variants of NP+VP+MP and some of them in Chinese are also be variants of NP+VP. Then, a constraint is argued on the derivation of English and Chinese special "AFPM" constructions. Finally, a constraint on the derivation of English and Chinese "AFPM" constructions is summarized and interpreted. One surface structure, "AFPM" construction, derives from two deep sentence structures that take the patient as the focus; simultaneously, each of the sentence elements...