A CBT-based Study Of English Middle Construction

The middle concept and its corresponding middle sentences or middle constructionshave achieved their independent status in recent years. It is well-accepted that the studyinvolving English middle constructions (EMC) is one of the most popular research topics.The traditionally influential generative approaches are far from satisfactory inexpounding this construction. Recently lots of studies have been done from the cognitiveperspective, but it seems that they cannot explain the middle constructions (or middles)in a dynamic and vivid way.As a result, the author attempts to place English middles into the cognitiveframework, precisely, the conceptual blending theory (CBT) along with other relevantcognitive theories, to explore the following issues: the formation and motivation ofEnglish middle constructions; the middle features and the blending of the features;selective constraints on individual constituents and correlations between elements ofEMC. The examples in this thesis are partly selected from the classic papers or articles inthe literature, and partly adapted by the author based on some previous examples.First, the author makes an attempt to give a unified definition about English middlesand meanwhile to make a new classification. With regard to the classification, it containsprototypical English middle construction (PEMC) and non-prototypical English middleconstruction (NPEMC). For the former one, the structure is [patient subject+transitiveverb+adverbials]; while for the latter, it can be further divided into two types:[passiveparticipant+verb+adverbials] and [passive participant+verb]. Compared withprevious researches, the author not only gives detailed analyses on the PEMC, butattaches more importance to the NPEMC. The formation and motivation of EMC aregiven detailed analyses. Besides, this paper concerns with the analyses of middle featuresand the blending of the features. Finally, it also includes explanations of the selectiveconstraints.Through analyses, the author comes to the following conclusions. Firstly, both the prototypical and the non-prototypical middles come from the integration of the passiveconcept and the active concept, and noticeably the motivation of their formation lies inthe responsibility of the passive participant plus the appraisal and descriptive pragmaticmeaning. Secondly, the syntactic middle features consist of passive participant, activemorphology, obligatory adverbial or effects; whereas the semantic features containimplied argument, generic, non-event and modality. The passive participant ishighlighted and thus is responsible for the existing middle features, among which theresponsibility of the passive participant is the cause, while the syntactic and semanticfeatures of the passive concept are the effect. Due to the responsibility of the passiveparticipant, nearly all middle features can be blended and explained as a whole. Last butnot least, the study indicates that the conceptual blending theory has its limitations in theinterpretation of the selective constraints on the middle constructions. However, it can beaccounted for by means of lexical features as well as cognitive grammar theories. It isfound that constraints not only exist on adverbials and middle verbs, but on the internalrelationships between each element of EMC.