| English middle construction is a special linguistic structure in the active form but with the passive meaning.English middle construction refers to the internal features of the things which make the event designated by the verb to happen in the way expressed by the adjuncts.Different from ergative construction and tough construction,the English middle construction shows its specific characteristics of implicit agent,modality,genericity and responsibility,thus becomes a research focus both at home and abroad.The previous studies on the English middle construction are mainly about the categorization of the construction,the selective restrictions of adjuncts and the transitivity of middle verbs,with gaps in the cognitive mechanisms and syntactic and semantic features of this construction,including the following aspects: first,although previous scholars have explored the cognitive mechanisms of the English middle construction,the relationship between this mechanism and the features of the implicit agent and “active form with passive meaning” is not clear;second,the classification of typical and atypical middle verb constructions seldom involves the similarities and differences concerning the global construal metonymic mechanisms;third,it is still obscure whether there is an interactive relationship between the components of the English middle construction and the whole construction.Therefore,it is necessary to classify the English middle construction and to conduct a comprehensive and meticulous observation and discussion on its syntactic,semantic features and cognitive mechanisms.In summary,research questions of this dissertation are as follows:1)How many types of English middle construction variants are there? What are their syntactic and semantic features?2)How are they different and similar in terms of the cognitive mechanisms?3)Why are their cognitive mechanisms different?4)Are the interrelationships among the components restricted by the cognitive mechanism of the construction?For the research questions raised above,the present study has chosen COCA as the data source and has conducted the retrieval,selection,sampling,collation,and analysis of the data in COCA.First,179 verbs were selected to fill in the searching formula for further retrieval in COCA,and the results were screened to form a corpus of English middle sentences.Second,Ant Conc5.3.0 tools are used to classify and retrieve the middle verbs of all the forms,and calculate the token frequency in order to group and integrate the middle sentences.Afterwards,by using the marking function of Ant Conc tool to categorize the adjuncts according to their part-of-speech and to further classify the sentences and calculate the frequency.The result is then input into SPSS,is sorted and integrated to form a table.Finally,the qualitative analysis is conducted on the middle sentences,the theories involved are conceptual blending theory and conceptual metonymy theory from cognitive semantics.They are adopted to deal with the cognitive mechanisms of the English middle construction.By means of the theories of cognitive grammar including construal theory and coercion theory,this paper expounds the similarities and differences in the cognitive nature of different middle construction variants and the cognitive motivations which cause the differences.The combination of qualitative and quantitative research methodologies contributes to a more in-depth and multidimensional excavation of cognitive mechanisms and motivations of the English middle construction.The major findings of the research are as follows:1)According to the integration and analysis of sentences from corpus,it has been discovered that the subject of English middle construction can be a noun or a pronoun.The construction with modal verbs accounts 24.4% of the total number.The most frequent verb is sell.Based on the adjuncts,the English middle construction can be classified into two types: VP+AP and VP+?.VP+AP construction is the most typical one,and is the prototype of English middle construction.In the construction,the subject is patient,and the verb is transitive,which can collocate with the subject to form VO construction.The adjuncts can be PP,ADV,NP and ADJ.The semantics of this construction is adjunct-oriented,and is able to be divided into six groups: time,location,quality,analogy,difficulty and misc.The frequent middle verbs in VP+?middle construction are different from those in VP+ AP type,probably due to the lack of adjunct.Moreover,it is revealed that the subject and the modal verbs have little effect on the adjunct in the English middle construction.2)English middle construction is generated by specific cognitive mechanisms rather than random or accidental occurrence.Conceptual blending theory is able to provide the explanation the unique characteristics of the English middle construction with active form,passive meaning and implicit agent.Nevertheless,the two types of English middle construction show difference on the construal.The “state” meaning of VP+AP middle construction is prominent due to the adjunct and the construction itself,the mental scanning involved is summary scanning.As for the VP+? middle construction,for the loss of adjunct,the construction meaning is between “state” meaning and “action” meaning,so it is construed between summary scanning and sequential scanning.3)The metonymic mechanism.Both two types of English middle construction have undergone two steps of conceptual metonymy,namely action for result metonymy and result for property metonymy.The semantic expression of VP+AP middle construction relies more on the conventionalized context,so-called adjuncts and construction itself,while the other type has a strong dependence on conversational context,and it is easy to have a polysemic interpretation.4)The interrelationships of the components and the construction.Both construction coercion and lexical coercion exist in the VP+AP middle construction.The verb meaning is coerced by the construction meaning and “state” meaning becomes prominent.The construction meaning is coerced by modal verbs and gets modal meaning.For VP+? middle construction,construction meaning is easy to be coerced by “action” meaning carried by the verb because of the default of adjunct,which leads the construction to having a bit “action” meaning.The research methodology of this thesis is on the basis of real language,combined with quantitative statistics and qualitative analysis.This paper makes a detailed analysis of the typical and atypical characteristics,cognitive mechanism and interrelationships of the English middle construction.The research results are based on the statistical results of corpus real language,this paper proves and establishes the status of VP+AP and VP+? as the two types of the English middle construction variants,and denies the hypotheses that the subject of middle verb should be a noun phrase and the function of the modal verb is to fill in the absence of adjunct.This paper discusses the similarities and differences between the two types of the English middle construction variants and the cognitive mechanisms that give rise to these differences in terms of cognitive semantics and cognitive grammar.It has been found that sequential scanning and summary scanning may be a continuum rather than simple binary opposites.From the perspective of coercion,this paper analyzes the interrelationships among the components of middle construction,and the wrestling force between the construction and the lexical items is regarded as one of the reasons for the motivation of the construction variants.The research results as well provide some reference for the acquisition of the English middle construction for EFL learners. |
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