The Study On Middle Construction And The Licensing Conditions Of Sentence-completing In Mandarin Chinese

Middle construction is of great value and significance in the study of the grammar,It is also always getting the attention of the linguists, and the previous researches exist considerable divergences about the definition of middle construction. This paper makes a relatively clear concept of Chinese middle construction which is based on the preceding studies, and pointing out that “V-qilai” accusative subject sentence is not Chinese middle construction, it is just general topic sentence, and also as has the related characteristics of topic structure, this confirms Chinese belongs to the topic-prominent languages. Based on observations and through the analysis of Chinese, the form constitutes of tough construction “NP(patient)+Hao/Nan/Rongyi+V” is the true Chinese middle construction, it has the essential difference with “V-qilai”sentence, in line with the relevant definition standards of middle construction.The form of “NP(patient)+Hao/Nan/Rongyi+V” often consists of the modifier such as “Hao/Nan/Rongyi” and so on, if the modifier composition does not appear, the sentence is not legal. The modifier provides new discourse information component,which is part of the information focus and the feature of focus has the grounding function, so that the sentence becomes grammatical.Every sentence needs a focus element, conveying the new information, the modifier composition of middle construction is used to meet the pragmatic requirement,this is also one of many ways to fulfill that the information is focus constituent. The study shows focus plays an important role in Chinese middle construction, the information focus is under the influence of focus feature and occupies the specifier of FocP in syntactic construction, through the grounding of focus, it generates the legal sentences.