The Semantic Orientation Analysis To Adjuncts In Chinese Middle Construction

As one unique linguistic form, Middle Construction has attracted a lot of linguistsand scholars at home and abroad to carry out systematic researches on it. However, thestudies about the adjunct of Middle Construction are relatively scarce. Furthermore,most existed researches on it just focus on the application regularities and classificationsof adjuncts, rather than its semantic orientation.To make up this research gap and analyze the semantic orientation of adjunctsmore comprehensively,178correct examples of Chinese Middle Construction havebeen collected from papers devoted to Chinese Middle Construction published in CNKIas the research subjects. Meanwhile, the author adopts Construction Grammar Theory(Goldberg,1995) as analyzing theoretical frame to explore semantic orientations ofadjuncts in Chinese Middle Construction by returning sentence structure to its deepargument aspect.Through systematic analysis, the semantic orientations of adjuncts in ChineseMiddle Construction can be classified into eight categories, i.e. agent-oriented,patient-oriented, instrument-oriented, percept-oriented, theme&agent-oriented, goal&agent-oriented, location&experiencer-oriented and patient&agent-oriented. Inconclusion, the present study not only fills the gap of semantic orientation to adjuncts inChinese Middle Construction, but also sheds light on practical applications as well,making people better understand this phenomenon and then providing certain referencevalue to translation and Chinese education.