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

Beginning from Keyser&Roeper (1984), the middle construction has been a hot topic in linguistics. Studies of the middle construction are basically about that of Indo-European languages, while studies of Chinese middle constructions start from Sung (1994). Although many researches have been done on English and Chinese middle constructions, the nature of middle constructions, especially the syntactic and semantic features of Chinese middle constructions, remains a mystery. Therefore, it is necessary to conduct a thorough and in-depth research on the syntax and semantics of English and Chinese middle constructions, and a contrastive study will be helpful.In the beginning, this dissertation talks about the features of middle semantics, including its genericity, modality, the arbitrary reference of the implicit agent, and the responsibility of the grammatical subject. In the meantime, the dissertation also explores the interrelations among those features, and finds that the core of middle semantics is genericity, dispositional genericity, to be specific. In other words, middle constructions are disposition ascriptions. As a result, the described passive participant is promoted to the subject position, while the agent is demoted. Since dispositionals are subject-oriented generic sentences, the implicit agent acquires an arbitrary interpretation. Moreover, instead of reporting real happenings, dispositional generics convey the conduciveness of the subject entity to the action designated by the predicate verb. In other words, as disposition ascriptions, middle constructions inherently embrace a modal meaning. Thus, the feature of dispositional genericity, as the core of middle semantics, leads to all the other features of middle semantics.Middle semantics is universal across languages, but it is realized by different syntactic structures in different languages. That is to say, middle constructions are encoded in different ways in different languages. As English and Chinese belong to different language families, English and Chinese middle constructions are bound to have many differences in their syntactic representations.The existence of English middle constructions does not arouse much opposition, but linguists disagree when it comes to whether there are middle constructions in Chinese. Due to that, we first of all try to prove the existence of Chinese middle constructions. Based on previous researches, we presuppose "NP+Vqilai+AP" as the Chinese middle construction. Before all, we prove its status as an individual construction, and then we compare that construction with other similar constructions, including active constructions, passive constructions, patient-subject constructions, and topic constructions. We come to the conclusion that "NP+Vqilai+AP" cannot be taken as a part of other constructions and its meaning is independent of other constructions. Then by comparing a subsection of "NP+Vqilai+AP", i.e, the part with a non-agentive subject, with middle semantics, we find that the meaning of "NP+Vqilai+AP" is consistent with middle semantics. Moreover, we also compare "NP+Vqilai+AP" with the English middle construction, and find many similarities between the two constructions. Therefore, we conclude that there is a chance that "NP+Vqilai+AP" is the Chinese middle construction.Based on that hypothesis, we divide "NP+Vqilai+AP" into three types, i.e, types A, B, and C, according to the different semantic orientations of AP. We find that type A is very different from types B and C in many ways, while types B and C are essentially the same. After comparing the three types with middle semantics, we come to the conclusion that types B and C of "NP+Vqilai+AP" are the Chinese middle construction. Some researchers take structures like "VP+Vshangqu+AP","VP+Vzhe+AP","VP+Vlai+AP", and "NP+AP+V" as other realizations of middle semantics in Chinese. After analyzing those structures one by one, we find that they do not conform to the restrictions of middle constructions. Therefore, we define Chinese middle constructions as types B and C of "NP+Vqilai+AP".After the delimitation of Chinese middle constructions, we go on to talk about the component parts of English and Chinese middle constructions, including their arguments, verbs, and adjuncts. As for their arguments, we discuss both the argument in the subject position and the implicit agent which is not syntactically present. By comparing the subjects of English and Chinese middle constructions, we find that English and Chinese middle constructions allow different thematic roles in the subject position. Generally speaking, Chinese middle constructions allow more cases of non-internal-argument subject than their English counterparts.The restrictions English and Chinese middle constructions impose on their predicate verbs have something in common. For example, in other contexts rather than the middle construction, those verbs share semantic features like [+volitional],[+transitive], and [+perfective]. On the other hand, however, the restrictions on middle verbs between English and Chinese are also different from each other. For instance, English middle verbs sometimes allow the presence of objects or resultative complements. Nevertheless, Chinese middle verbs rarely come with objects and they are incompatible with resultative complements. Generally speaking, Chinese middle constructions have higher productivity than English ones, and many verbs that are not eligible in English middle constructions form perfectly acceptable Chinese middle constructions.Apart from that, we talk about the transitivity of English and Chinese middle verbs from two perspectives. In the first place, we discuss the transitive nature of those verbs in other environments rather than the middle construction. Then, we analyze their transitivity in the context of middles, and conclude that middle verbs become derived intransitives as a result of their interaction with the construction meaning.As we know, both English and Chinese middles need some kind of adjuncts. English middles require adverbial modification, which can also be replaced by negation, stress, focus and so on. Chinese middles require adjective modification, and there are no ways to substitute this kind of adjuncts. Therefore, all Chinese middle sentences have appraisal meaning, i.e. they express speakers’ subjective evaluation of the properties of the subject entities. Although the adjuncts in English and Chinese middle constructions are very different from each other, this does not constitute a distinction between English and Chinese middles, since the adjuncts share the same function in both constructions. This superficial difference is due to the different characteristics of English and Chinese. To be specific, Chinese verbs allow different forms of modifiers, while verbs in English are usually modified by adverbs.Besides, we also have to understand why English and Chinese middles require adjuncts. There are three possible answers to that question:it can be structural, semantic, or pragmatic. We find that adjuncts in middles are due to pragmatic constraints. That is to say, adjuncts are used to satisfy the requirement that every utterance have a focus that serves to convey new information in the discourse.After an in-depth study of the components of English and Chinese middles, we then talk about English and Chinese middles as a category. We first of all summarize the defining features of English and Chinese middles, and point out that sentences conforming to all those features are prototypes in this category, while sentences violating one or two of those features are peripheral members of the category. Afterwards, we divide English and Chinese middles into different types. Through a careful comparison, we find that English middle constructions convey more various meanings than Chinese middles and that all Chinese middles contain a shade of subjective meaning, which is not the case in English middles. Moreover, the boundary between middles and other similar constructions is not clear-cut. Therefore, to some extent, this study also confirms the fuzzy nature of boundaries between categories.