Contrastive Analysis of the Middle Construction

The English Middle Construction (EMC), as a piculiar syntactic structure, shares its semantic features, but diversifies in its syntactic configuration compared with other langtages. This paper tries to have a contrast study of the Middle Construcitons between English and Chinese and find the two languages share the same semantic features that the incompatibility between the semantic quantitatives (SQs) of the Adverb (Adjunct in the syntactic term) and the SQs of the Verb denoted by the predicate of MC leads to the deactivization of the predicate by means of the Adjunct, functioning as a quantitative device, assign delimitation to the predicate, hence ensures the grammaticality of the construction. But syntatically, we agree that the NP Movement Approach accounts for the formation of EMC, while we argue in Chinese it is the verb raising that results in the MC. This paper f‘n-st represents the structural representation of the English Middle Construction; then the structural analysis is elaborated in comparison with that in Chinese, based on the previous studies; and finally the motivations of the Ecs in the perspective of syntactic and semantic functions are explored and hence a new hypothesis is raised to probe the similar construction in Chinese.