A Corpus-Based Constructional Approach To The English Middle Construction

In English,there exists a middle construction,which usually appears in sentences like the following examples:(1) The bureaucrats bribe easily.(2) The book translates easily. (Keyser & Roeper 1984:383)Such a construction is quite elusory.It is active in form,but passive in meaning. Therefore,to define it involves both syntax and semantics.Up to now,many scholars from both home and abroad have approached the English Middle Construction(EMC) through different perspectives,such as descriptive,generative and cognitive perspectives,which contributes greatly to the clarification of the complicated situation of the research on the EMC.However,with our corpus findings,we note that some idiosyncrasies around the EMC still remain a mystery and a satisfactory account of the EMC is needed.The present study,thereupon,on the basis of construction grammar,is intended to provide a unified account of all the idiosyncrasies around the EMC.To achieve this goal, the constructional study of the English Middle Construction(EMC) is grounded upon the real-life linguistic data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA).The thesis is composed of six chapters.In the first chapter,the main concern of the present study is briefly introduced. Then a preliminary probe into the EMC is carried out,through which a working definition of the prototypical EMC is provided.Besides,the methodology,the significance of the research and the source of the data are presented.In Chapter Two,based on the linguistic data from COCA,we provide an overall description about the specific prototypical and atypical features of the EMC.The purpose for this chapter is to present mysteries around the EMC;hence,to prepare for the discussion about the demerits of the previous researches in Chapter Three,and about a constructional approach to the EMC in Chapter Five.Chapter Three surveys the previous researches on the EMC.These researches are sorted into four categories:the descriptive approach;the generative approach,the functional approach and the cognitive approach,among which we lay emphasis on the scan of the generative approach and the cognitive approach.In the light of the literature review,the research questions of the study are introduced.Chapter Four furnishes a sketch map of the development of the construction grammar.It begins with a brief introduction to the relationship between the cognitive linguistics and the construction grammar,a presentation of different versions of construction grammars,and the concept of "construction" in different linguistic schools. Finally,the theoretical framework of Goldbergian Construction Grammar is proffered abbreviatedly.Chapter Five presents a unified constructional account of the EMC based on the corpus analysis.The existence of the EMC is attested;the integration of verbs with the construction is exemplified;and specific constraints on the EMC are made clear.Chapter Six serves as a summary.In this chapter,the merits and limitations and remaining questions of the current research are listed.After a long discussion and theoretical analysis,we finally come to the following conclusion:The EMC is a construction in that several aspects of the meaning of the EMC(e.g. passive meaning and genericity interpretation) and of their form(e.g.the adverbial modification) are not generally predictable from the lexicon or from other established constructions.We hold that in EMC,the syntactic expression of arguments is concerned with specific manners,and such an adverbial modification should be taken into our consideration concerning the argument structure of EMC.And,the polysemy of the EMC is discussed around different types of adverbial modifications in the EMC.Besides these,we propose some other important constraints on the EMC which include the responsibility constraint on the undergoer;the internal structure constrain on the verb;the undergoer-centered constraint on the adverbial modification;the agentivity constraint on the implicit causer and the epistemic modality-oriented constraint on the tense and aspect combined with the EMC.Finally,the major merits of the current research are not only that it makes a practical attempt to probe into the unexpressed profiled participant roles which are only briefly mentioned in Goldberg's works(1995,2003,2006),but also that it strives to bridge the gap between theoretical and empirical researches.