The Generation Mechanism Of English Middle Construction From The Perspective Of Philosophy Of Mind

Owning to its complex semantic and syntactic features,the generation of English middle construction always draws linguists’ attentions at home and abroad.As for the studies on the generation mechanism of English middle construction,predecessors mostly study them from the generative approach and cognitive approach.However,there is few scholar who systematically explores the generation mechanism of English middle construction from the perspective of philosophy of mind at present.As a result,the paper tries to analyze the generation of intrinsic features in English middle construction from the perspective of philosophy of mind in order to provide a reasonable mechanism for the generation of English middle construction.The research questions of the paper are as follows:（1）Are adverbs necessary in English middle construction?（2）Why is agent implicit but patient prominent in English middle construction?（3）What’s the deep reason making English middle construction express passive meanings with active forms?Based on the research questions,the following conclusions can be made from the paper.（1）As conditions of satisfaction,adverbs,negative auxiliary verbs and modal verbs can describe the existent form of intentional content making the mental representation successfully express in order to convey intentionality.From this point,negative auxiliary verbs and modal verbs are seen as derived adverbs,so the functions of adverbs,negative auxiliary verbs and modal verbs as conditions of satisfaction are named adverbial effect.Therefore,adverbs are not necessary but adverbial effect is necessary in English middle construction.（2）Both a perspective of subject in perception and mental-physical supervenience make agent implicit in English middle construction.Meanwhile,patient belongs to the central physical property,which is emphasized,so patient appears in the position of agent in the construction.（3）Unpredictability of non-mediocre emergence makes English middle construction express the passive meanings with the active forms.Contributions in the paper are as follows.Firstly,this paper explores the generation mechanism of English middle construction from the perspective of philosophy of mind,which provides a new research perspective for the generation of English middle construction.Secondly,the paper enlarges the research scope of philosophy of mind constructed by Xu Shenghuan,which contributes to the further development of the theory.Thirdly,this paper not only proves the necessity of adverbial effect in English middle construction but also elaborates that adverbial effect can be the condition to differentiate typical English middle construction from atypical English middle construction.Meanwhile,the paper finds that there are restrictions on distinguishing between typical English middle construction and atypical English middle construction according to the classification of NP.