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Chapter One Introduction
As a general introduction to this thesis, this chapter will give a brief description ofthe background of the study, the objectives of the study as well as the contents andstructure of the thesis.
1.1 Background of the Study
The middle construction, as a unique construction across languages, has becomeone of the hottest topics among linguists. The studies on the middle construction wereinspired by Keyser & Roeper (1984). Keyser & Roeper (1984) labeled the sentences in[1] as middle constructions.[1] a. The bureaucrats bribe easily.b. The floor paints easily.c. The book translates easily.d. The chickens kill easily.(Keyser & Roeper 1984)Since the first systematic study made by Keyser & Roeper (1984), much attentionhas been devoted to middle constructions in European languages, such as English,German, Dutch, French, Italian and Spanish, by numerous western linguists withdifferent academic backgrounds. Linguists have conducted detailed studies which coverthe derivation of the middle construction, the syntactic and semantic features of themiddle construction and the comparison between the middle construction and ergativestructures under various linguistic theories, including generative grammar, functionalgrammar and cognitive linguistic theories (e.g. Keyser & Roeper 1984; Stroik 1992,1995, 1999; Hoekstra & Roberts 1993; Fagan 1988,1992; Zribi-Hertz 1993; Ackema &Schoorlemmer 1994, 1995; Rapoport 1999; Lekakou 2002).The middle construction has also aroused Chinese linguists’ interest. SungKuo-ming (1994) is the first linguist who made a study on the Chinese middleconstruction. He labeled the following sentences as Chinese middle constructions.
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1.2 Objectives of the Study
This thesis is concerned with the middle constructions in English and Chinese. Tostart off, it is of essence to present a working definition of them. Middle constructionsacross languages do not syntactically behave in a uniform way but they share acommonality in semantic features. Lekakou (2002: 402) points out that there onlyremains middle semantics rather than middle construction. In other words, it is themiddle semantics that is of cross-linguistic university. Henceforth, the middleconstructions can be uniformly defined from the perspective of semantics. It is customarily believed that the middle constructions should conform to the followingsemantic criteria (He Wenzhong 2004; Fu Yan 2012; Fu Yan & Chen Zongli 2017):1. Modality. Middle constructions do not report actual events which have taken placebut often indicate the potentiality of the occurrence of events.2. Responsibility. In middle constructions, the grammatical subjects (passiveparticipants) take the responsibility for the outcome of the event due to theirinherent properties.3. Agentivity. There must be an arbitrary agent who can initiate the action denoted bythe verb although it is not visible at the syntactic level.4. Genericity. The middle constructions are generic statements which attribute someproperties to the grammatical subjects.All in all, the middle construction is a type of construction that portrays theproperties of the grammatical subject which is responsible for bringing about theoccurrence of the event described by the verb in a certain manner designated by theadjunct. Therefore, the agent is defocused and implied.
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Chapter Three Methodology
This chapter will provide a discussion to the methodology of the present study. Thetheoretical framework, namely the Construction Grammar, and the research methodsinvolved in the process of data collection and data analysis will be discussedrespectively.
3.1 Theoretical Framework
The present study takes Construction Grammar developed byA. E. Goldberg (1995,2003, 2006) as the theoretical framework. Goldberg (1995,2003,2006) has provided aconvincing explanation concerning the notion of construction and the interactionbetween verb and construction.Goldberg (1995: 1) points out that constructions are form-meaningcorrespondences or form-meaning pairs. Goldberg (1995: 4) defines the construction asfollows:C is a CONSTRUCTION iffdefC is a form-meaning pair <Fi, Si> such that someaspect of Fior some aspect of Siis not strictly predictable from C’s component parts orfrom other previously established constructions.It is argued that a construction is defined to exist if some aspects of its form ormeaning are not strictly predictable from the properties of the components it contains orfrom other constructions existing in language. The constructions considered as pairingsof form and meaning are symbolic units. Furthermore, constructions are independent ofthe lexical items that instantiate them in that they themselves carry meaning, whichmeans the meaning of a construction is not equal to the combination of the meaning ofeach component part it contains.In addition, Goldberg’s research on the interaction between verb and constructionhas yielded impressive results. Goldberg (1995: 60-65) esteems that there is aninteractive relation between the meanings of constructions and verbs. Goldberg (1995:50) indicates: “If a verb is a member of a verb class that is conventionally associatedwith a construction, then the participant roles of the verb may be semantically fusedwith argument roles of the argument structure construction.” Hence, the interactionbetween construction and its verb reflects in the fusion of the participant roles of theverb and argument roles of the construction. The fusion is meant to capture thesimultaneous semantic constraints on the participant roles associated with the verb andargument roles of the construction.
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3.2 Data Collection
This thesis is concerned with a study of English and Chinese middle constructionsbased on the corpus approach. The authentic data used in the present study are gainedfrom four online corpuses, among which two are English corpuses, namely Corpus ofContemporary American English (henceforth COCA) and British National Corpus(henceforth BNC), and the other two are Chinese corpuses, namely Corpus of ChineseLanguage (henceforth CCL) and Chinese National Corpus (henceforth CNC). COCA,established from1990 to 2015, is the largest, balanced and freely-available corpus ofAmerican English containing more than 520 million words. BNC was established byOxford University Press from 1980s to early 1990s and it contains 100 million words.The Chinese middle constructions are collected via the contemporary Chinese corporaof CCL and CNC, which consist of more than 580 million characters and about 20million characters respectively.
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Chapter Three Methodology.....16
3.1 Theoretical Framework......16
3.2 Data Collection.........18
3.3 DataAnalysis............19
Chapter Four Comparison of Verbs in English and Chinese MiddleConstructions......22
4.1 Constraints on Middle Verbs...... 22
4.2 Types of Middle Verbs.......33
4.2.1 Types of Verbs in English Middle Constructions.......... 33
4.2.2 Types of Verbs in Chinese Middle Constructions..........38
4.3 Similarities and Differences....... 41
Chapter Five Comparison of Adjuncts in English and Chinese MiddleConstructions......43
5.1 Constraints onAdjuncts.....43
5.1.1 The Status and Function ofAdjunct............43
5.1.2 The Syntactic Position ofAdjunct......49
5.1.3 Non-volitional Constraint..........51
5.2 Types ofAdjuncts.....53
5.2.1 Types ofAdjuncts in English Middle Constructions.....53
5.2.2 Types ofAdjuncts in Chinese Middle Constructions.... 60
5.3 Similarities and Differences....... 65
Chapter Five Comparison of Adjuncts in English and Chinese Middle Constructions
This chapter will first analyze the constraints on adjuncts in English and Chinesemiddle constructions, i.e. the status and function of adjunct, the syntactic position ofadjunct and the non-volitional constraint. Then the types of adjuncts appearing in thecollected English and Chinese middle constructions will be revealed. In the last part, thesimilarities and differences between adjuncts in English and Chinese middleconstructions will be summarized.
5.1 Constraints onAdjuncts
It is overt that there is generally a mandatory adjunct in the English and Chinesemiddle constructions. However, only limited adjuncts are permitted in middleconstructions. Proper characterization of the adjuncts admissible in English and Chinesemiddle constructions is still a hard nut to crack.As has been observed by the former researchers (e.g. Keyser & Roeper 1984;Condoravdi 1989; Cao Hong 2004a; Yoshimura & Taylor 2004; He Wenzhong 2005;Davidse & Heyvaert 2007 ), both English and Chinese middle constructions generallyrequire some sort of adjunct ( Details for the types of adjuncts are provided in 5.2).When the adjuncts are taken away, most of the English middle constructions wouldbecome unacceptable. Why do English and Chinese middle constructions require the obligatoryoccurrence of such an appropriate adjunct? The role and function of the adjunct havebeen intensively studied and hotly debated. Some researchers hold that the need ofadjuncts is due to the syntactic inaccessibility of the agents in middle constructions (e.g.Pitz 1988; Hoekstra & Roberts 1993; Lekakou 2005). Some esteem that semantically,the adjuncts are needed to provide the scope for the genericity (e.g. Condoravdi 1989;McConnell-Ginet 1994). Some contend that adjuncts, regarded as the core of theassertion, are demanded to provide an information focus (e.g. Iwata 1999; Goldberg &Ackerman 2001; He Wenzhong & Wang Kefei 2009). The above three kinds ofstandpoints on the status of adjunct in the middle construction are illuminatedrespectively as follows.#p#分页标题#e#
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Conclusion
This chapter will draw a conclusion of the major findings of the present study,demonstrate the implications of the findings and reveal the limitations of this study.The previous chapters have discussed the issues on verbs and adjuncts in Englishand Chinese middle constructions. The findings of the present study are listed asfollows.With respect to the middle verbs, firstly, the present study has discussed someconstraints on verbs in English and Chinese middle constructions, including transitivity,volitional constraint, temporal and aspectual constraint. By virtue of the previousstudies and the collected data, the conclusion is reached that English and Chinesemiddle verbs have both similarities and differences concerning the selectionalconstraints. On the one hand, typical English and Chinese middle verbs are transitive inother constructions and become derived intransitive when enter the middleconstructions as a result of their interaction with the construction meaning. In addition,both English and Chinese middle verbs should be semantically volitional. On the otherhand, English and Chinese middle verbs show a difference in the temporal and aspectualconstraint. English middle verbs allow various tenses and aspects while Chinese middleverbs are not permitted to take any aspectual marker.
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References (abbreviated)
