Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Background
Sentences, like the books sell well or the meat cuts easily, are called middle sentences(or middle constructions). Under the influence of traditional pedagogical grammar, we arevery familiar with the active and passive voice and its corresponding active and passivesentences. As for middle voice or middle sentences, they remain strange or even unknownto many of us. Since last century, after Keyser and Roeper (K and R 1984) published theirwork related to this field and defined it as middles formally, a great number of linguistsand scholars have been inspired and so much attention has been paid to the middles, andtherefore lots of studies have been done. We can be assured that ever since the study ofKeyser and Roeper, it has been a very heated research topic both at home and abroad.A sentence originally referred to a syntactic form, while a construction is more or lesscognitively meant to be a pair of form and meaning. The researches involving middles aregenerally concerned with both form and meaning, and thus the thesis prefers the term“middle constructions” for this particular structure in English, which are also frequentlyused in other academic articles and papers.The studies on English middle constructions are mainly divided into two schools: thegenerative school and the cognitive school. Under the framework of generative grammar,two approaches, namely the syntactical or movement approach and the lexical or non-movement approach are applied, are competing with each other. In fact, bothapproaches have their own limitations and weaknesses, which are by no meanssatisfactory.
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1.2 Purpose and Significance
Be it traditional generative approaches, or some comparatively static cognitiveapproaches, various theories all attempted to give interpretations related to the middleconstructions. But up to now, none is entirely convincing. Therefore, a furthercomprehensive study concerning the middle constructions based on CBT is to be required.The thesis aims at exploring the following questions:A. Why can the conceptual blending theory interpret the English middle constructionmore powerfully?B. Can the conceptual blending theory explain the formation and motivation of prototypical middles as well as non-prototypical middles? If the answer is yes,how does it explain them?C. Can the middle features and selective constraints each be under the explanation ofCBT along with other relevant theories? If the answer is yes, how does it explainthem? If not, why?
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Chapter Two Literature Review
2.1 Voice and Definitions of EMC
According to Quirk et al (195), voice is a grammatical category composed of theactive and the passive voice. Chomsky (42-43) holds the same view there are two types ofvoice. They both argue that there exists an active-passive transformational relationship.However, the division is apparently unsatisfactory. As a matter of fact, the passives do notalways have their corresponding active forms.Middle voice, especially in Greek, refers to the inflectional category of the verbs,expressing the subject or agent that does the action, also called middle reflexive category.Halliday (“Introduction” 151) believes that voice can be divided into two parts: Middlevoice and non-middle voice. Based on his definition, middle voice refers to a process involving only one participant, as is shown by this example, The author therefore concludes that the definition of middle voice mentioned byHalliday is different from ours, which is partly ergative and partly middle.Klaiman (104) proposed three “Basic voice” types, including actives, middles andpassives. Among them, middles are given the description that the grammatical subject isthe locus of the effect of the event. As was mentioned above, “The glass broke” alsobelonged to the middle voice according to Klaiman. Neither Halliday nor Klaiman had thesame middle voice as we have mentioned recently, and the corresponding middles theydefined are actually similar to the ergatives.
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2.2 Distinctions between English Middles and Similar Constructions
Middles, ergatives and passives are often put under the category of patient-subjectclauses in that their patients are put in the position of subjects. According to He (115), it isthe stative ergatives or inchoatives that are very similar to middles causing muchconfusion to linguists and scholars. That might be the reason why a large number ofresearches have been done on the topic of the distinction between middles and ergatives aswell as other similar constructions. Syntactically, some of the ergatives are actually veryhard to tell from middles, except that they are under some certain contexts. Semantically,English tough constructions (short for TC) and passive constructions are equated withmiddle constructions to some extent. This section will firstly elaborate on the researches ofmiddles and ergatives, followed by middles and passives, then middles and TC in the finalpart. On the basis of Perlmutter’s unaccusative hypothesis (157-189), the intransitive verbsare subcategorized into unaccusative verbs and unergative verbs. Within the framework ofargument structure, it should be clear that an unaccusative verb only has a direct internalargument without external argument, whereas a unergative verb has the opposite structure.The specific unaccusative and unergative sentences are shown respectively as follows.
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Chapter Three Theoretical Framework......... 22
3.1 Conceptual Blending Theory (CBT) ...... 22
3.2 Other Relevant Terminologies and Theories .......... 27
3.2.1 Grammatical Construction.... 27
3.2.2 Conceptual Metonymy and Metaphor .......... 28
3.2.3 Prototype Theory (PT).......... 29
3.3 Summary......... 29
Chapter Four Analyses of EMC Based on CBT........... 31
4.1 Active, Middle and Passive Concept and Their Correlations ......... 31
4.1.1 The Active, Middle and Passive Concept ..... 31
4.1.2 The Correlations between Different Concepts ..... 33
4.2 Classifications......... 34
4.3 Middle Features ...... 37
4.4 Formation and Motivation of EMC Based on CBT ....... 38
4.5 Blending of Middle Features .......... 53
4.6 Selective Constraints on EMC........ 54
4.7 Summary......... 56
Chapter Five Conclusion........ 58
5.1 Findings .......... 58
5.2 Implications .... 59
5.3 Limitations and Further Suggestions...... 60
Chapter Four Analyses of EMC Based on CBT
4.1 The Active, Middle and Passive Concept and Their Correlations
It is obvious that concept is some sort of mental representation which will beillustrated in the first place. More importantly, the three concepts in this paper refer to theconcepts with typical properties. Concept is a category coming from the cognitive domainwhereas the voice category is frequently involved in the traditional or pedagogic grammardomain. Comparatively speaking, though they are located in different domains, they aresupposed to indicate the same syntactic representation. In cognitive grammar represented by Langacker, language is considered not to becoded in an arbitrary way, but motivated cognitively. Meaning is regarded as the primaryelement, while the form as the syntactic representation of meaning seems secondary. Inaddition, meaning in cognitive linguistics is often thought to be equivalent toconceptualization. Thus it is concluded that semantic structures can determine the syntacticstructures, so to speak, syntactic structures are determined by their corresponding concept.Besides, we hold the view that concept consists of semantic meaning and syntactic form.This can be exemplified as follows.
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Conclusion
In the previous chapters, English middle construction has been accounted for under theframework of the conceptual blending theory and other relevant theories. In this chapter,some findings will be presented in the first place followed by the implications of thefindings as a second section. Finally, the limitations and further suggestions will be given. Up till now, this thesis has concentrated on making analyses about English middleconstruction grounded on conceptual blending theory, along with other linguistic theories.The major findings are concluded in the following aspects.First and foremost, EMC consists of PEMC and NPEMC. The author concludes thatthe NPEMC is the extension of the PEMC. Of all the EMC members, the PEMC is themost typical and core one with obvious features of the EMC. While the NPEMC varies,some peripheral ones are qualified with few middle features. Concerning the type ofNPEMC with adverbial excluded, the author holds that there is not only active and passiveconstruction involved, but background information (cognitive context) is more profiled andemphasized. Meanwhile, it has been proved that the EMC is derived from the passiveconcept and the active concept. Moreover, the active role of the passive participant isthought to be responsible for nearly all the middle features. Thus, we come to theconclusion: the deep motivation of the EMC is the responsibility of the passive participantas well as the appraisal and descriptive pragmatic meaning. Hence, the author argues CBThas strong explanatory power for the formation and motivation of the middle construction,and its explanation is more vivid and dynamic.
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