A Contrastive Study Of The Adjunct In English And Chinese Middle Construction

The Middle Construction,as a distinct linguistic phenomenon,has always been a heated research issue for decades.The adjunct in the Middle Construction is a vital part that carries the information focus of the whole middle sentence.Nevertheless,in previous studies,the attention paid to the adjunct was not enough,and the contrast of the adjunct in English Middle Construction(EMC)and Chinese Middle Construction(CMC)has rarely been mentioned.Based on natural linguistic data retrieved from COCA and BCC corpora,this present study carries out a contrastive study of the adjuncts in EMC and CMC from two different perspectives.On one hand,within the framework of Construction Grammar,the semantic and syntactic restrictions on EMC and CMC adjuncts are analyzed and explained by the co-effects coming from three kinds of coercions,namely Construction coercion,lexical coercion and pragmatic coercion.On the other hand,the semantic and syntactic features of EMC and CMC adjuncts are depicted and compared,then the reasons of the similarities and discrepancies between them are expounded from the instinct characteristics of English and Chinese.The major findings of this research are as follows:Firstly,from the perspective of coercion,we draw several conclusions.On the semantic level,there are identical semantic classifications of EMC and CMC adjuncts because of the coercion from the Middle Construction;the unvolitional restriction towards the adjuncts are the result of the coercion from both the Middle Construction and the middle verb;while the consistency of semantic orientation of EMC adjuncts are brought about by the Construction coercion from EMC itself,the discrepancy of semantic orientations on CMC adjuncts are due to the lexical coercion from the middle verb.On the syntactic level,the restrictions on EMC adjunct's syntactic types originate from the lexical coercion from the NP and the middle verb,while the restrictions on CMC adjuncfs syntactic types come from the coercion from the Middle Construction.In addition,the appearance of the bare middle in EMC is due to the pragmatic coercion from specific contexts.Secondly,several semantic and syntactic features of the adjuncts in EMC and CMC are discussed and explained from the fundamental features of the two languages.The discrepancy in part of speeches of the adjuncts can be attributed to three main reasons.Firstly,English is a language that takes the verb as the core of a sentence while the Chinese language tends to be a topic-comment language,which means the adjunct in CMC is less restricted by the verb than that in EMC.Secondly,in Chinese the division of part of speeches is still a controversial issue and one kind of part of speech can play the role of different syntactic functions.Thirdly,in CMC,besides the verb,the adjunct can also modify the subject or the implied agent,both of which are nouns.Therefore,it makes sense that adjectives are the major part of CMC adjuncts.EMC adjuncts have the same semantic orientation towards the middle verb while the CMC adjuncts9 semantic orientations are diversified.In Type-2 CMC,like the EMC,the adjunct can only point to the middle verb.In Type-1 CMC,the adjunct's orientation is complicated because the division of PoS in Chinese is indefinite.The asymmetric frequency of adjuncts that respectively express easiness and difficulty is explained by the Marked theory,the Pursue the Positive Principle and the Pollyanna Principle.The position of EMC adjunct is fixed at the end of the sentence,because of the request from the feature of English adverbial and the semantic feature of EMC.In Type-1 CMC,it is the function of qilai and the Principle of Temporal Sequence that make the adjunct appear at the end position.In Type-2 CMC,the adjunct is in front of the verb for the sake of the Saliency Principle.