The Study Of Pragmatic Enrichment In The English Middle Construction

The middle construction, as a special syntactic and semanticconstruction, has received much attention and has been a widelydiscussed topic in linguistic studies of recent decades. The thesis hasmade a relatively detailed description of the middle construction inEnglish, and has made a study of pragmatic enrichment in the Englishmiddle construction from the perspective of Lexical Pragmatics. Thisthesis has proposed that pragmatic narrowing of the passive-participantsubject in the English middle construction plays an active role in themiddle formation. Specifically, it has effects on the selection of thepredicate verb and makes the meaning of the predicate verb modified, andit also has influences on the selection of adverbs. On the basis of this, thethesis has proposed that the motivation of the middle construction is tohighlight an active role which the passive-participant subject can play inthe outcome of virtual events.The research work done in this thesis includes the following parts:First, a definition of the English middle construction has been givenfrom the perspectives of syntax and semantics, which helps us to confinethe scope of the study, and a relatively comprehensive description andanalysis of the middle construction has been illustrated.Second, a brief revision of previous studies of the middleconstruction has been made, and through a detailed analysis of middleconstructions, it has been found that the currently prevailing accounts ofmiddle constructions are mostly constructed on the inadequateunderstanding of middle constructions. The problems existing in theprevailing Movement Approach and Non-movement Approach have beenanalyzed.Third, lexical pragmatic theories have been adopted in the study of the English middle construction, and pragmatic enrichment in thisconstruction has been explored. Lexical Pragrnatics focuses on theencoded meaning of pragmatic inference from many perspectives, such aslexicology, semantics, pragmatics, cognitive linguistics, etc., and includesthe pragmatic narrowing and broadening of lexicon. In the Englishmiddle construction, the understanding of the meaning of the subjectdepends on the pragmatic enrichment, and the prototypical meaning ofthe subject is narrowed within certain context, i.e. highlighting theintrinsic properties of the subject. On the relevance-theoretical account,the understanding of the subject is based on context, and the hearers makecognitive efforts by constructing the optimal relevance in pragmaticinference. The prototypical meaning of the subject is found inadequate inutterance interpretation, thus such meanings need to be narrowed in amore restricted sense until the optimal relevance is satisfied in certaincontext. On the basis of the analysis of the pragmatic inference, on theone hand, this thesis has argued that the motivation of the middleconstruction is to highlight an active role which the passive-participantsubject can play in the outcome of virtual events, i.e. in the speaker'spoint of view, the intrinsic properties of the subject are largelyresponsible for the outcome of the event in a specific manner. On theother hand, the middle semantics determines the nature of the middleconstruction as "time-irrelevant". Therefore, the meaning of the predicateverb prototypically portraying actual occurrences of events needs to bemodified to satisfy the middle semantics. In this case, the state meaningof the predicate verb is highlighted while its action meaning is implied,which is syntactically represented in active form and in simple presenttense.This study of the middle construction in English indicates that themiddle construction is compatible to the meaning it intends to express. Itsformation is the result of selecting linguistic structure and grammatical marker to meet the needs of semantic expression. The middleconstruction is cognitively motivated, and then conventionalized orgrammaticalized, rather than arbitrary. After grammaticalization theconstruction then has a constructional meaning. It is meaningful in itself.In conclusion, this study is helpful for us to get a betterunderstanding of the middle construction and to reveal the relationshipbetween semantics, pragmatics and its syntactic structure. The syntacticrules are the shadowing of realistic relations in syntax. Syntacticstructures are not arbitrary but motivated.