A Contrastive Study Of Middle Voice In English And Zhuang Language

M.A.K Halliday points out that if an action itself is described with a related participant which lacks of the feature of agency, such a clause is called neither active voice nor passive voice but middle voice. Cognitively there is a middle state between active and passive voice existing really. This is the requisite and foundation for our present study. So far, studies on middle voice have been made by many linguists and scholars.As to the generating mechanism of middle construction, neither the lexical approach nor the syntactic approach can reach a satisfactory explanation, but under the theoretical framework of cognitive grammar, a unified account can be made. We argue that the motivation of middle construction is to deemphasize the role of the active participant, and highlight a passive participant (or the peripheral participant of an event). Middle voice construction can be used to express features of the grammatical subject's internal property in making the action happen. Also it can express the situation that the internal property of grammatical subject can contribute to the action happening or not.Through contrastive study, it is found that although English and Zhuang belong to different family, they share the same middle semantic features: non-eventivity, stativity, generic, implicit agentivity and modal concept. Only their syntactic constructions differ to some extent. The typical EMC (English Middle Construction) can be described as: S+( V+ADJ/ADV), in which S is a patient subject, V is a predicative verb in active form, V and ADJ/ADV predicates the subject together; The atypical English middle voice construction can be described as: S+(V+NP), among which S is the peripheral participants like instruments, location etc, V is the predicative verb in an active form, and NP is the agent role in general. By contrast, ZMC (Zhuang Middle Construction) in general can be divided into middle morpheme ZMC and non-middle morpheme ZMC. And they can be described respectively as S+ (V+ HWNJDAEUJ + ADV)and S+ (V+ADV)etc. Zhuang language middle voice construction belongs to one of the topic-comment construction in Sino-Tibetan languages. The middle verb in Zhuang language doesn't need any inflectional change like English. Furthermore with so many middle morphemes, the ZMC appears more flexible and productive than EMC. Theoretically this thesis further verifies the cross-linguistical pervasiveness of middle semantic structure and enriches the middle voice research. Practically through contrastive study, the translation between English and Zhuang language can be enlightened and this is helpful for English learning and teaching in Zhuang areas. Also it helps promote the communication between English and Zhuang peoples in language, culture and many other aspects.