A Comparative Study Of English Anticausative And Middle Constructions From The Perspective Of Generative-Constructivism

The anticausative construction shares both syntactic and semantic similaries with the middle construction in English,so that they may easily be confused.Apart from similiarities,there do exist syntactic and semantic differences between two constructions.However,there have been few studies comparing them systematically so far.Thus,this dissertation,conducted within the framework of the Generative Constructivism,aims to compare them at the semantics-syntax interface,particularly at the event-built vP and the temporal TP,in the same change-of-state eventual context that both constructions share with each other.Based on the generally accepted Compositional Principle in the field of syntax-semantics interface,there is an ’isomorphism between syntax and semantics.Thus,syntactically,it adopts the zero-dressed root hypothesis of the radical Generative Constructivist approaches(particularly Borer’s Exo-skeletal approach)to be the syntactic essence of the whole work and simultaneously applies basic syntactic operations such as merging and movement in the syntactic derivation of each construction.Semantically,it gives a semantic interpretation of event over time to each syntactic structure by combining the neo-Davidsonian event semantics and referential tense semantics.Specifically,it combines causal and semantic aspectual approaches to compare the semantic features of the vP in each construction,and simultaneously explores the issues of the derivational level,transitivity alternation as well as the semantic restrictions of the arguments in each construction.As to the TP domain,it adopts the referential approaches of tense(and grammatical aspect)to account for the semantic properties of tense and aspect reflected in the syntactic form of each construction.It aims to synthesize the insight of both the syntactic and semantic approaches to event structure,tense and aspect to make sense of the two main grammatical domains of vP and TP in each construction.Based on the Zero-dressed Root Hypothesis,the present study finds that the anticausative and the middle are both derived at the syntactic level due to their verbal roots lacking grammatically related information.As well,the zero-dressed roots also implies that they are neither inherently transitive nor intransitive in lexicon.Thus,it adopts the common-base approach to transitivity alternation of both the anticausative and the middle.With regards to the common-base approach to their transitivity alternations,it finds that both of them involve the alternation of voice but with much greater flexibility.By several admissible operations like applicable functional applications and event identification during the derivation of each construction,the anticausative has only inactively non-agentive causer but no agentive causer,whereas the middle construction requires implicit agent role as well as adverbial modifier.It also finds that the vP of the anticausative construction has similar syntactic representation to that of the middle,but the former has more semantic restrictions than the latter.Specifically speaking,in the same change of state context,the semantics of the theme subject in the anticausative is constrained by the quantification and affectedness,whereas that of the middle is not constrained by these semantic factors.The middle construction also allows more semantic verbal class of activity.As for the temporal domain,the present study finds that the TP of the anticausative has much more flexible syntactic and semantic features than that of the middle,and the former can describe true individual events whereas the latter cannot represent a concrete event,although they have similar structure of vP despite semantic nuances in the same change of state context.The main reason is that the anticausative construction has both T and Aspect heads,which make all the three time variables present in both the syntactic and the semantic structure,while the middle construction with a simple present tense lacks a default grammatical Asp head and hence neither can the event time variable nor the reference time variable be explicitly present in its syntactic or semantic representation.Thus,the middle is deprived of the capacity for denoting a true individual event even though it has the similar event-built vP to that of the anticausative.The present study does not only examine the truth of theories through comparing the domain of vP and TP between the anticausative and the middle at the interface between syntax and semantics,but also makes it possible to set up bridges between the pure event domain and the temporal domain,the event semantics and the referential semantics to tense and aspect.The findings of the present study also verify the generally accepted principle of Compositionality between syntax and semantics.Every kind of syntactic configuration determines its corresponding semantic interpretation.As an effective means of promoting theories,the contrast between the anticausative and the middle warrants further research.