A Study On English And Chinese Middle Construction From The Perspective Of Syntactic Analysis

Middle construction is traditionally thought of as a construction between active and passive, and is also considered as an expression of passive meaning with the active form. English middle construction involves a complex interplay between syntax and semantics and it is one of the most heatedly discussed topics in linguistics. According to the constraints on the formation of middle construction, there must be two prerequisites in the derivation of this special structure:the aspect of corresponding verb in its active sense is restricted to activity verbs or momentary verbs in perfective and the subject of the middle sentence must bear responsibility for the action denoted by the predicate.Middle construction is also an important phenomenon in Chinese and often used in daily communication. The essential characteristic of Chinese middle construction is:The entity that represented by the subject makes the active incident represented by the verb take place with a certain state because of certain inherent attribute features.The traditional research on middle construction pays much attention to the lexical level. It mainly centers on the derivation and the properties of middle construction as well as its restrictions. Linguists mainly study on middle construction from cognitive aspect, but it seems that the traditional method cannot provide a sound explanation to the derivation of middle construction and the special characteristics of middle verbs.This thesis is a syntactic study of English middle construction and Chinese middle construction within the theoretical framework of Generative Grammar. It uses WH-movement to analyze the derivation of middle construction, and before making a comparison between EMC and CMC is conducted, it examines the general syntactic and semantic properties of English middle construction and Chinese middle construction. Then, this thesis tries to find the similarities and differences between English middle construction and Chinese middle construction, and to find the causes for the differences. This thesis consists of six chapters:Chapter One offers a brief introduction to the theoretical framework, research questions and organization of the thesis.Chapter Two is the literature review, which presents a brief review of the research abroad and the research at home.Chapter Three is devoted to English middle construction, analyzing the formation of English middle construction, its syntactic and semantic properties as well as its constraints.Chapter Four makes a general study on Chinese middle construction, involving the formation of Chinese middle construction, its syntactic and semantic properties as well as its constraints.Chapter Five makes a comparison between English and Chinese middle construction, pointing the similarities and differences between English middle construction and Chinese middle construction.The last chapter provides the conclusion of the whole thesis. It presents the main findings of the study, the limitations and the suggestions for further research.