A Comparative Study Of The Middle Construction In English And Chinese

Middle Construction has attracted a significant amount of attention due to the nature of its special syntactic and semantic features. At present, the study of English middle construction is relatively mature; there has been an agreement on its basic syntactic and semantic characters. Whereas, the study of Chinese middle construction has just began. There are several expressions that can be used to express English middle construction; however, the formation of the Chinese middle construction has not reached an agreement. Based on the fundamental theory and method of constructive linguistics, this thesis will make a comparison between English middle construction and its Chinese expressions and find what Chinese middle construction is. It will then explain the derivation of English and Chinese middle construction.English middle construction consists of NP, VP and XP, with "NP-VP-AdvP" as the most typical one. On the basis of the typical English middle construction "NP-VP-AdvP", this thesis made a comparison between it and its Chinese expressions, "NP-AdvP-VP", "NP-VP(V起来(qilai))-AdvP" and "NP-VP(V得(de))-AdvP" from syntactic structure, semantic features of the three composing components, the whole sentence, and tried to make a deep study of the Chinese middle construction, so as to confirm the formation of the middle construction in Chinese. Finally, the conclusion is made from the study that "NP-VP(V得(de))-AdvP" is middle construction in Chinese. At the same time, in accordance with these analyses, this thesis explains the derivation process of English and Chinese middle construction. It is due to the detransitivization of the verb, it lost the ability to assign the case and the NP has to move to check its features.This thesis analyzes the syntactic and semantic features of English middle construction, by the comparison between the typical English middle construction and its Chinese expressions, confirms the formation of the Chinese middle construction and explains the derivation of English and Chinese middle construction. This study is still at a preliminary stage and there are still a lot of problems which require further study.