A Contrastive Study Of English And Chinese Middle Constructions

Middle construction, a familiar phenomenon of language facts, is unique in its structure andmeaning. And the uniqueness has pushed the middle constructions into spotlight in the area oflinguistics. Previous studies pertaining to middle constructions involve the syntactic andsemantic features, the restrictions on their formation, the exploration on their formationmechanism, the comparison with other syntactically similar structures and cross-linguistic studyof middle constructions and the like. In a word, those researches are mainly conducted in theareas of traditional grammar, generative grammar, functional grammar, cognitive grammar andconstruction grammar. However, previous researches on the modifiers of middle constructions,how the form and the meaning get united are relatively few and similarities and differencebetween English and Chinese middle constructions remain to be further explored.The present thesis adopts a combined model of cognitive grammar and constructiongrammar, which is based on corpora of COCA and CCL PKU, and by virtue of quantitative andqualitative method, contrastive approach and a unitary research method combining syntax andsemantics to resolve the following questions:(1) What kinds of modifiers are in English and Chinese middle constructions; what role do themodifiers play in the two kinds of constructions?(2) How do the form and meaning of middle constructions of English and Chinese getcorresponded?(3) What are the convergent and divergent points between English and Chinese middleconstructions?Through corpus-based empirical analysis, the research on will facilitate people’sunderstanding about English and Chinese middle constructions, such as the fundamentalfeatures and the formation mechanism. On the other hand, the study will help improve people’scognitive ability on language and provide theoretical guidance to cross-language instruction andacquisition.By retrieving230English middle constructions marked by (read)s,(sell)s,(sleep)s and(write)s and277Chinese middle constructions marked by “读起来/上去”,“写/睡起来”,“住着”,“卖得” and classifying them into12types of English ones and6types of the Chinese ones according to the various adverbial expressions and alternative devices as well as into canonicaland non-canonical ones in line with categorization and prototype theory, the thesis comes to theconclusions that various modifiers, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, bare verbs, etc ofEnglish and AP, PP, VP and subject-predicate structure, etc of Chinese middle constructions doplay important roles in pointing out the property of the grammatical subjects; on the other hand,it is the middle constructions that exert influence on the middle verbs; and the mechanism ofconstruction coercion and lexical coercion help the form and the meaning get united.Furthermore, by means of contrastive analysis, similarities and difference between Englishand Chinese middle constructions can be found, such as syntactically different (i.e. AP type withadverbial effect of Chinese middle constructions is richer than the English middle constructionswith adverbial expressions due to the diverse adjectives in Chinese; The change of the middleverbs is different thanks to construction coercion), but semantically convergent (i.e. thedescription of the grammatical subjects’property is motivated by the action of invisible agents).On the one hand, the paper has creatively adopted a unitary research method whichsurmounts the block between syntax and semantics and explored the middle construction as awhole. On the other hand, this study combines the cognitive model and construction grammarmodel together. This effort has proved effective by giving a relatively adequate explanation tothe formation and extension of middle constructions, and the form-meaning correspondence ofmiddle constructions. By means of contrastive analysis on English and Chinese middleconstructions, convergent and divergent points of them are easily obtained.However, the research mainly focuses on synchronic analysis. Diachronic analysis on thetwo kinds of middle constructions is beyond the scope of present thesis. Middle constructions ofEnglish and Chinese are ever-changing. Combining diachronic analysis and synchronic analysisare well worthy of future researches. Furthermore, when dealing with the classification ofcanonical and non-canonical middle constructions, the boundary between the two kinds is a bitfuzzy. And this may lead to some overlappings in data classification. In the following days, anew dimension should be added when it comes to the classification of middle constructions intocanonical and non-canonical ones.