| The word"middle"originated from classification of voice, which is between active voice and passive voice and is called"middle voice". It is referred to as a kind of verb categorization with inflections in Indo-European languages like Greek. This is a semantic conception, which refers to some action or state that has impact on the subject of the verb or verb itself. Middle construction means specific syntactic characteristics of a series of transitive verbs (Kemmer, 1993).The syntactic research of middle construction began in an early age both in foreign countries and in China. It could be divided into two schools: lexical generation (Fagan, 1988; Ackema & Schoorlemmer, 1995) and syntactic generation (Keyser & Roeper, 1984; Stroik, 1992, 1995, 1999; Dai Manchun, 2001).This thesis classifies middle construction into two types, namely unitary middle construction and complex middle construction, compared with ergative construction. It does a second language research to study Chinese students'acquisition of middle construction.There are altogether 92 subjects in three different proficiency levels. The inquiry consists of test papers including blank fillings and grammatical judgment. ANOVA is conducted through SPSS to test the significance of the data collected. From the inquiry, it is found that ergative construction is better acquired by Chinese learners of English at different proficiency levels, while complex and unitary middle constructions are less acquired by Chinese learners of English at different proficiency levels.From the findings comes the conclusion that language transfer, complexity of syntactic operation and cognition all have an interactive influence on L2 learners'acquisition. Chinese learners of English often make errors such as using passive voice instead of ergative and middle construction. Ergative construction has only one argument and no agent, so its syntactic operation is very simple, and thus is best acquired by Chinese learners of English. Besides language transfer, cognition is also a factor that has impact on acquisition. |
