A Study On The Middle Construction From The Perspective Of Philosophy Of Mind

The middle construction is a special kind of language phenomena. Up to now, a greatmany scholars at home and abroad have conducted abundant researches on it in differentlevels and from different angles. These researches have well accounted for the formation,cognitive motivation, defining features and construction conditions of the middle constructionand well explained the similarities as well as differences between the middle construction andother similar constructions. With regard to the formation of the middle construction, scholarsmainly carry out their researches through the lexical approach, the NP movement approachand the cognition motivation exploration approach within the theoretical framework ofgenerative grammar and cognitive linguistics. However, few of them have ever analyzed thisquestion from the perspective of the philosophy of mind. Under guidance of the methodologyproposed by Xu Shenghuan of “starting from language phenomenon through the analysis ofthe theories of philosophy of mind to arrive at language generalization” and the researchstrategy of “selecting what seems sound in the theories and following them”, this paperexploits the theories of intentionality, supervenience and emergence against the background ofphilosophy of mind to probe into the formation of the middle construction.The study shows that the formation of the middle construction is initiated byintentionality. The intentionality frame includes two parts: intentional content and intentionalattitude. The intentional content of the middle construction is the mental property of thepassive participant (the argument represented by the grammatical subject, hereinafter referredto as “passive participant”), that is, the mental feeling gained by the subject about the passiveparticipant according to the physical properties of the passive participant. Such mentalproperty supervenes on the physical properties of the passive participant. After the content to be about by the middle construction is specified by intentionality, the subject then selectsappropriate intentional attitude to describe the intentional content, here is mainly the mentalevaluation on the importance of different participants to the content to be about by the middleconstruction. As the middle construction is mainly concerned about the property of thepassive participant which has little to do with the active participant (i.e. the agent, hereinafterreferred to as “active participant”), the subject will naturally improve the status of the passiveparticipant, make the passive participant much more prominent and the active participantimplied. After the intentional content and intentional attitude are both determined, the mind ofthe subject then witnesses different forms of gestalt transformations, here is mainlyfigure-ground transformation. Finally, the primary consciousness like “people wash the cloth”emerges into the reflective consciousness of “the cloth is washing itself”. It is just because ofthe subjective imagery of “the cloth is washing itself” which has been formed in the mind ofthe subject that results in the active form of the middle construction. Though the subjectiveimagery formed during the stage of reflective consciousness is novel in nature, such noveltywill be eroded so long as the imagery frequently appears in the mind of the subject. Given this,the subject could finally flexibly apply the middle construction and even becomes unaware ofthe particularities lying in the middle construction in the future.