Study Of Agent-cutting In English Middles: A Constructional Approach

English middle construction (EMC or English middles) has been a hot topic in the literature both at home and abroad. But the existing researches mainly focus on its formation or its syntactic and semantic features. About the absence of the agent or the external argument in the EMC, few researches are done. Goldberg (1995) proposes that the agent role in English middles is cut by the construction, since the verb occurs in a construction which specifically cuts the profiled agent participant role. Goldberg's proposal is very enlightening. But no detailed analysis is offered. It is still unknown why the English middle construction is equipped with such a power to cut the profiled agent participant. Meanwhile, as is noticed in this thesis, though the agent in English middles is typically absent, there are a large number of attested English middles where the agent can be present as the compliment of the preposition for. A more intricate and urgent issue is that only the agent participants in the semantic frames of some verbs can be cut by the construction and make acceptable middles. So it is also believed that if Goldberg's claim is right, there must be some constraints which will influence the operation of cutting the agent.The present study, therefore, is intended to explore the phenomenon of agent-cutting in English middle construction within the framework of construction grammar. By conducting the present research, the author aims to find out the motivations for the syntactic absence of the agent in this construction and the constraints which can influence the cutting process.The paper is composed of six chapters:Chapter One is an introduction to the study. In this part, the objective of this study is pointed out. And some preliminary concepts are explained, as well as the significance and the arrangement of this study.Chapter Two begins with a detailed survey of the previous studies on the EMC which are related to the present study. Based on the literature review, the research questions of this study are raised.The following chapter gives a full description of the semantic and syntactic features of the EMC. Thereafter, a comprehensive description for the EMC is provided in the end of the chapter.Chapter Four offers some key concepts and current schools of construction grammar at first. Then the theoretical framework of this study, i.e. construction grammar developed by Goldberg, is given a detailed description in particular. Finally, in spirit of this framework, hypothesis for the motivations of agent-cutting in the EMC is proposed.Chapter Five expounds in detail the motivations of agent-cutting in the EMC within the hypothesis suggested in previous chapter. Meanwhile, the constraints on the process of agent-cutting are proposed and explicated.After a detailed discussion and theoretical analysis, we finally come to the conclusion in Chapter Six:Agent-cutting in English middles results from the indefiniteness of the agent. The English middle construction is mainly used to attribute inherent property to the non-agent role, typically the theme, which is primarily responsible, by means of the attributed property, for the event designated by the predicate. As a result, the primarily responsible non-agent argument, by means of its inherent property, is over-profiled and then foregrounded as the grammatical subject after the fusion of the non-agent argument of the EMC with the non-agent participant of the verb according to the Fusion Principle. However, the agent argument is maximally deprofiled, because it is indefinite and construed nearly irrelevant to the event structure of the EMC. The maximal deprofiling of the agent role in the EMC results into the syntactic cutting of the agent participant of the integrated verb after the fusion of the agent role of the EMC with the agent participant of the verb, which is further ensured by the over-profiling of the non-agent role in the EMC.In addition, it is argued that agent-cutting in English middles is constrained by some factors, namely, the definite agent argument constraint, the constraint from verb's semantic frame, the constraint from the semantic frame of composite structure and the pragmatic constraint.