A Contrastive Study Of The Syntax And Semantics Of English Middle And Tough Constructions

Due to its particular syntactic and semantic features,the middle construction has become one of the hottest topics for linguists ever since the publication of Keyser and Roeper(1984).English tough constructions have some similar features with middle constructions,thus it is necessary to distinguish these two constructions from the aspects of syntax and semantics.However,previous studies of the two constructions focus on their respective syntactic and semantic properties,and few studies pay attention to their similarities and differences.Therefore,the present study tries to deal with the following three questions:(1)What are the syntactic constraints that English middle and tough constructions impose on their component parts?(2)What are the semantic constraints that English middle and tough constructions impose on their component parts?(3)What are the similarities and differences between the two constructions?Based on Corpus of Contemporary American English(COCA)and British National Corpus(BNC),and in the framework of construction grammar,this study finds out:(1)There are some constraints on the verbs,adjectives in the process of middle and tough formation in syntax.An important syntactic feature of the middle construction is the transitive verb and it is frequently accompanied by some kind of adjuncts,such as adverbials.In addition,there are also some sentences whose verbs or subjects have contrastive stress.Tough constructions need adjectives that express the degree of easiness and difficulty,which excludes other types of adjectives,and it has the features of either the raising construction or the control construction.(2)The English middle construction often denotes a state.It cannot have an agent-oriented adjunct,because the adjunct describes the subject’s internal features and provides a focus and new information to make the sentence more informative.In addition,its theme-subject is inanimate because of the fact that the theme of verbs are most likely to be inanimate.Tough predicates can be considered as control predicates,and a single tough predicate can have different semantic relations with its subject.(3)As to the similarities between these two constructions,we have found that they share the following five properties: Firstly,the internal argument of a transitive verb appears in the subject position;Secondly,the agent is usually implicit;Thirdly,they are all stative;Fourthly,the subject referent has the responsibility reading;Fifthly,similar to the tough construction,the semantic core of the middle construction is also not the verb but the adjunct.Differences of these two constructions lie in their syntactic forms,the selection of verbs and adjectives,and the types of evaluative meaning expressed.