Study On The Interaction And Fusion Between Middle Verb And EMC

English middle construction is a special linguistic structure in the active form but with the passive meaning.It mainly expresses that the internal features of the syntactic subject make the event designated by the verb happen in the way described by the adjuncts.English middle construction is distinctive from the active and passive constructions and involves intricate relationships on syntactic,semantic and pragmatic levels.Therefore,it has become one of the hottest topics in the linguistic study at home and abroad.With regard to the interaction and fusion between middle verbs and EMC,previous scholars mainly carry out their researches through Lexical Projection View and Construction Grammar View,and both of them have already made great achievements.However,Lexical Projection view over-emphasized the lexical semantics and failed to predict many marginal heterogeneous sentence patterns.Coldberg(1995)‘s Construction Grammar only emphasized the single coercion of verbs with construction as a core,ignoring the rich semantic system and semantic potentials behind verbs.In view of the above situation,we find that there still exist the following questions to be further discussed: how do middle verbs affect EMC in the interaction and fusion between middle verbs and EMC? what's the motivation for the fusion of middle verb and EMC? Centering on this questions,this thesis intend to further explore the interaction and fusion between middle verbs and EMC.While affirming the coercion and accommodation of middle verbs by the compound event schema of EMC,this thesis intends to organically combine Construction Grammar with other relative cognitive mechanism like construction event schema analytical approach,conceptual construe and profiling in Cognitive Grammar to fully explore how the direct and potential semantic elements of middle verb interact and fuse with the compound event schema of EMC.In addition,we also explore the interaction between middle verbs and other components of the same level with middle verbs within EMC based on the conceptual combination manner in Cognitive Grammar.This thesis adopts the qualitative research with the research methods of introspection and abduction.And three findings can be concluded from this study.Firstly,the interaction between middle verbs and EMC should not be confined to the coercion and accommodation of middle verbs by the compound event schema of EMC from up to bottom,the direct and potential semantic elements of middle verbs also mutually act and are partly integrated to be activated and profiled by the compound event schema of EMC.Meanwhile,there also exists interaction among different components of the same level with middle verbs within EMC.Next,the motivation for the fusion of middle verbs and EMC is that the potential semantic framework of middle verbs like “force dynamics” and “causal chain” are semantically connected with the compound event schema of EMC.Then under the cognitive mechanism of categorization,the meanings of middle verbs are extended from their prototypical meaning “sb do sth” to “cause to do” and the fusion of middle verbs and EMC is achieved.Lastly,we find that the double-way interaction and fusion model between middle verbs and EMC in contrast can help predict middle verbs' admittance to EMC to some extent.For example,firstly,middle verbs might share the patient participant with EMC.Next,middle verbs must be in general present tense and perfective aspect;the potential semantic framework of middle verbs must imply both “force dynamic” and “causal chain” and the semantic orientation of them should not point to the agent.And lastly,the meanings of middle verbs must also be semantically compatible with those of different components of the same level with middle verbs within EMC,such as the syntactic subjects and the adverb.Since the coercion and categorization are not only manifested on the event schema of EMC over middle verbs,but also among different components of the same level with middle verbs within EMC.