A Contrastive Study Of English And Chinese Middle Constructions On The Prototype Theory

As a common yet complex linguistic phenomenon, the middle construction in English and Chinese has been a long-term hot research topic for people. During the past several decades, various linguistic schools, grammarians and scholars both home and abroad have conducted numerous research on the middle construction from different perspectives, and great achievements have been scored in various fields. However, the current contrastive research on English and Chinese middle construction is disperse and unsystematic on the whole. The reason is that the various and complex forms of middle voice in English and Chinese has made it difficult to contrast them thoroughly and systematically.Based on the previous research conducted by various scholars home and abroad, this thesis follows the guidance of the prototype theory to categorize the middle construction to set up a relatively comprehensive and reasonable category of the middle construction between English and Chinese. The thesis then adopts the contrastive method to analyze their corresponding similarities and differences from the cognitive perspective, and hopes to uncover the deep mechanism underlying the similarities and differences between English and Chinese middle construction to deeply grasp the cognitive essence of the middle construction.According to Prototype theory, this paper studies the English and Chinese middle constructions.The author believes that the middle construction can become independent sentence due to its unique syntactic structure to take the active form with passive meaning. This paper classifies the English and Chinese middle sentence into the prototypical and non prototypical middle sentence. The form expression of typical English middle sentence are"NP+V+modifier"and"NP+Auxiliary+not+V". In English prototype middle sentence, the patient is the subject. In the non-prototype middle sentence, the subject is the instrument、location or background. The expression form of the typical Chinese middle sentence is similar to the English middle sentence:NP+Vqilai+adj. The Chinese prototype middle sentence is also the patient as the subject and the location time、place or manner as the subject in the Chinese non-prototype middle sentence. There are several defined properties in the English and Chinese prototype middle construction. First:the patient argument is the subject of the sentence. Second:it should be the implicit agent argument. Third:the characters of the sentence are of generality and non-eventivity. The author suggests that the subject and verb in the prototype English and Chinese middle construction can be transposed to restore to the logical verb-object structure. As for the non-prototypal middle construction, there are some variants to form the sentences and the subject is not for sure the logical patient argument which can be served as tools, premises and settings, etc.From the cognitive perspective, the similarities between the English and Chinese prototypical middles lie in that the middle subject must have causative feature. In others words, the intrinsic characteristic of the causative feature of the passive participant make the event happen. The speaker believes that the passive participant is the action maker, which the event seems to be caused by the passive participant.The verb and subject in the prototypical English and Chinese middle construction exists the logical verb-object relationship. The similarities are that it does not show the implied agent and need the adverbial to express the state.The significant difference between English and Chinese middle construction is in the form. In English, the middle predicate is the simple active verb while in Chinese it is an adhesive morpheme qilai in the predicate verb.The difference is determined by the same semantic meaning and difference structures of the two kind languages. English is an inflectional language and the middle construction and it allows embedding the verb complement structure while in Chinese it is not allowed.As for the non-prototypical English and Chinese middle construction, the subject of the two kinds of languages is the same, such as objects,tools and the participants of the premises. But in Chinese, the manner or the purpose of the participants can also act as the subject. There is few in English middle construction. This kind of difference is caused by English and Chinese verb-object structure for the choice of the object. In comparison, the non-prototypical Chinese middle construction is more productive. We can from the external participants perspective to describe the event in the procedure. The middle structure can describe the relationship between the various participants in the procedure outside the process and the agent. Chinese is a kind of topic-prominence and parataxis language, therefore there is less constraints on the generation of Chinese middle construction...