A Corpus-Based Research On EMCs From Markedness Perspective

The English Middle Construction(EMC)has aroused a heated debate due to its special property,namely,it is active in the syntactic form but passive in the semantic meaning.A majority of scholars delve into it from the descriptive perspective,generative perspective and cognitive perspective.However,the research from the markedness perspective is unwonted.To start with,this thesis describes and analyzes the syntactic and semantic attributes of EMCs with the support of the author's self-built corpus.Then,this thesis applies Shen Jiaxuan's Markedness Theory into probing into the motivations that result in the formation of the syntactic and semantic attributes of EMCs.This research mainly illustrates the following four points.Firstly,in the syntactic level,the syntactic constituents of EMCs referring to tenses and aspects,sentence types,sentence structures(including grammatical subjects,verbs,adverbials and logical subjects),form a continuum of markedness hierarchy separately,and the members of each continuum have varying degrees of markedness.Furthermore,the syntactic constituents that take the largest proportions in the category of EMCs are unmarked in the category of EMCs,but marked in the category of voices,which turns out that the markedness of the same item can vary from one category to another.Secondly,in the semantic level,the semantic attributes of EMCs are interconnected and interactive with each other.The modality of EMCs,relying the modality of grammatical subjects,logical subjects,verbs or/and adverbials,forms a continuum of markedness hierarchy,and the genericity or non-eventiveness of EMCs derived from the genericity of verbs,logical subjects or/and grammatical subjects also constitutes a continuum of markedness hierarchy.Thirdly,the EMCs can be divided into the unmarked EMCs and the marked EMCs,and the unmarked EMCs have the following attributes:(1)They are the simple present tense;(2)They belong to the affirmative sentence;(3)They consist of three parts,namely,“NP + V + ADV”;(4)The patients are implemented as the grammatical subjects;(5)The verbs,active in the syntactic level but passive in the semantic meaning,are transitive verbs by virtue of the relationship between verbs and their grammatical subjects;(6)The adverbs such as “easily”,“well” and so on are behind the verbs;(7)The logical subjects(people in general)are implicit in the syntactic level but explicit in the semantic meaning;(8)The EMCs are deployed to indicate whether or how the grammatical subjects(taking the responsibility for the actualization of the event)undergo the process expressed by the verbs,and the EMCs do not describe the actual event,but designate the general state.The EMCs lie in a matter of the degree of markedness.That is to say,the more unmarked attributes the EMC owns,the closer distance to the unmarked EMC the EMC will be;contrary to this,the less unmarked attributes the EMC owns,the further distance to the unmarked EMC the EMC will be.In addition,the corpus analysis demonstrates that most of marked EMCs conform to the eighth attribute of the unmarked EMCs except the designing feature constructions that can violate not only the former seven attributes but also a part of the eighth attribute of the unmarked EMCs,namely,the grammatical subjects of designing feature constructions do not take the responsibility for the occurrence of the event.Fourthly,Shen Jiaxuan's markedness perspective can provide a nature and holistic explanation on the formation of the syntactic and semantic attributes of EMCs with the foundations of cognition,pragmatics,semantics,and embodiment.However,there still exist some limitations because the capacity of the author's self-built corpus is small,and the classifications of the examples are conducted by the author's subjective judgement.Therefore,the author expects more and more scholars will engage in the research on employing Markedness Theory to delve into EMCs and consummate the theoretical system of EMCs.