Analysis Of Middle Construction Features Of “V-qilai” Based On Information Dependency Language Model

The purpose of this paper is to discuss whether V-qilai construction in Chinese can be treated on a par with middle construction in many other languages, such as English.Middle construction is a sentence structure where a patient argument does not occur in the object position but in the grammatical subject position and the verb is in active form.The sentence expresses passive meaning through an active voice, thus it is located in the“middle” between passive and active construction. Sentences of middle constructions always follow the pattern “NP+V+AP”. The initial NP is the patient while the agent is implicit. The construction expresses the meaning “the properties of NP cause the V-ing of NP to be AP”.Much has been learned about this construction in English. Scholars endeavored to explore its formation mechanisms and extract its defining features through generative and cognitive approach. Hard as they tried, the issue of conceptualizing and defining middle construction seems never ending. The notion that middle construction attributes some inherent property to the subject which is responsible for the outcome of the event denoted by the verb in manner or result regardless of time and agent is mostly accepted.Since middle construction has been proved to exist across languages,it calls the wide attention from research community at home. The issue thus arises to whether Chinese exhibits any phenomenon of middle construction. V-qilai construction, with a sentence form of “NP+V-qilai+AP”, is viewed as the realization of middle construction in Chinese by most scholars in the research filed. However, scholars who see the similarities between Chinese and English middle construction hold that middle constructions exist in Chinese, while those who focus on the differences argue that there is no middle construction in Chinese. The quest continues.This thesis conducts a formalized syntactic description of sentences in V-qilai construction so as to check whether V-qilai construction behaves the essential features of middle construction. The findings of this research are:V-qilai construction and English middle construction share the essential characteristics both syntactically and semantically, i.e., the patient NP appears as the grammatical subject, verb appears in active form, verb does not describe particular events in time.In this sense, V-qilai construction can be taken as the realization of middle construction in Chinese.However, the two are slightly different from each other.Syntactically, the predicate of English middle construction is the verb itself, AP modifies only the predicate, the agent can never appear on the surface.V-qilai construction, on the other hand, the predicate is AP, verb tagged with qilai is reduced to be adverbial, the agent can appear as the subject of the verb.Semantically, the argument in English middle construction is comparatively fixed,the agent of the predicate is diverse. AP orients to the predicate. In contrast, V-qilai construction exhibits high flexibility, AP can orient to not only the predicate, but also the agent, the patient,even other components in the sentence.The current research verifies IDLM’ s feasibility and effectiveness to give a syntactic-semantic description of English middle construction and V-qilai construction in Chinese.