A Systemic Functional Analysis On"the Clothes Wash Easily"

There is a type of construction in English like "The clothes wash easily", which has active form but denotes passive meaning; therefore, it has particular syntax and semantics and is generally defined by scholars as middle construction. Focus of previous studies on English middle construction is mainly on its generation mechanism, the aspectual properties of middle verbs, and the restrictions on the modifying element, etc. These studies mainly start from the perspective of cognitive linguistics or transformative-generative grammar. This thesis takes systemic functional grammar as its framework and analyzes the meta-functions of English middle construction.Systemic functional grammar studies the function and application of language and holds that language is a system of meaning potential, and the realization of its meaning depends on the environment in which language is used and the choices made according to the environment. The representation of the world by language is realized by the three meta-functions.This thesis, associating previous studies on English middle construction, starts by clarifying Halliday’s (1967,2004) criterion for classifying voice. It can be seen that in Halliday’s (1967,2004) systemic functional grammar, the term "middle" is different from the definition by most scholars; what most scholars define as middle construction, is defined as "process-oriented passive" by Halliday (1967). Nevertheless, this thesis adopts the term middle construction for sake of convenience. The restrictions on the choice of middle verbs include:affectedness restriction, aspectual restriction and responsibility restriction. This thesis holds that the affectedness restriction and responsibility restriction are parallel to Halliday’s (2004) classification of processes. This study shows that the main verbs in most English middle constructions are material verbs, and in particular, the creative doing sub-type. English middle construction actually denotes the meaning of a relevant attributive relational process, that is, describing features of the grammatical subject. Besides, English middle construction also expresses a modality meaning, denoting possibility.