Middle Construction In English And Chinese: A Cognitive Semantic Study

Middle construction is traditionally thought of as a construction between active and passive, and as an expression of passive meaning with the active form. English middle construction, which involves a complex interplay between syntax and semantics, is one of the most heatedly discussed topics in linguistics. The traditional research on English middle construction focuses on the syntactic or the lexical level. It mainly centers on two topics: the derivation of English middle construction and the aspectual properties of the verb. It seems that the traditional method cannot provide a sound explanation to the derivation of English middle construction and the special characteristics of middle verbs.Middle construction, as a very important phenomenon, also exists in Chinese. This dissertation gives a comparative study about middle construction in Chinese and English. Construction is a form-meaning pair (Goldberg, 1995: 4), and middle construction is not exceptional. The prototypical middle construction has the"N+V+A"construction, which has its sentential and argument structure. Chapter three studies the syntactical features and semantic features of English middle construction, and deals with the correlation of the features at the two levels. The present study shows that middle construction is not a middle state of active construction and passive construction, but it is a special descriptive construction. Being non-eventive, tense and aspect are not proper for middle verbs. The aim of a middle sentence is to describe an object, not to state an event, so the middle verb is not the center of the syntactic structure and meaning. The semantic center is transferred to the modification after the verb. As a strict subject-predicate language, there is a tradition that the predicates must be verbs or phrasal verbs. Therefore, the structural importance of middle verbs in English is greater than that in Chinese, which is actually fallen to be the adverb and its predicate function is shifted to the modifier after it. This is the basic difference between Chinese middle construction and English middle construction, and it is also the cause of the several syntactic and semantic differences, which are presented in Chapter four.