A Contrastive Study On Middle Constructions In English And Chinese

Middle construction is a special language phenomenon and it can be seen in several different languages. Previous studies mainly put middle construction under generative grammar. The most popular explanations of middle construction include “syntactic explanation” and “lexical explanation”, but the problem is that instead of investigating the external features and the internal features as a whole, these explanations just touch upon the external features of middle construction, so these explanations fail to reveal the relationship between form and meaning. Based on the ideas of Construction Grammar, the present paper is to explore the similarities and differences of the external and internal features of middle constructions in English and Chinese. The data in this study will be collected from the previous studies and the corpus the author established herself. The findings are as follows:Firstly, there are similarities and differences as for the subject. According to the different roles of the subject, the data collected can be classified into six types: patient subject(MC1), instrument subject(MC2), place subject(MC3), means subject(MC4), time-space subject(MC5) and zero subject(MC6).Secondly, middle verbs in both Chinese and English middle constructions are active in forms, and they are of the features of transitive and intransitive verbs. English middle verbs are simple present tense, while in Chinese middle construction [NP+V-Qilai/Zhe/Shangqu+Modifier], verbs take such markers as “Qilai”, “Zhe” and “Shangqu”, and although there are no such markers in a Chinese middle construction, it can also be changed into “Qilai” middle construction. Besides, Chinese middle verbs cannot take such aspect auxiliaries as “Guo” and “Le”.Thirdly, there are modifiers in both Chinese and English middle constructions, without which the two constructions cannot be grammatically correct. Modifiers in English middle constructions are mainly adverbs or adverbial phrases, sometimes are preposition structures, preposition structures with adverbs or “as if” with sentence(“as if” can be replaced by “like”), and some are even adjectives(the middle verbs are perception verbs), while modifiers in Chinese middle constructions are mainly adjectives, some are verb-object structures, subject-predicate structures or causative structures.Fourthly, by putting Chinese and English middle constructions under the explanation of CG and representing them with Box Diagram, it is obvious to find that both English and Chinese middle constructions are compatible to the middle semantics they express. By investigating the internal structure, it's easy to find the meaning of middle verbs and middle semantics can influence and restrict each other. Besides, corresponding Chinese and English middle constructions have similar syntactic structure and express the same middle semantics.The present study proves that middle construction has its own features in different languages, mainly embodying in external structures, while the corresponding MCs have universality across languages.