The Middle Construction in Mandarin Chinese

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2007
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Swarthmore College. Dept. of Linguistics
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Thesis (B.A.)
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Full copyright to this work is retained by the student author. It may only be used for non-commercial, research, and educational purposes. All other uses are restricted.
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Abstract
The middle is an un accusative construction which expresses a modal generalization over events (Keyser and Roeper 1984). Although the middle is not homogenous cross-linguistically (Ting 2006), manifestations of the middle have been observed in most Indo-European languages. In this thesis, I will develop criteria for middles based on cross-linguistic generalizations and argue for the existence of a middle construction in Chinese. Chinese has a class of so-called 'notional passives,' unaccusative sentences which display active morphology but receive passive interpretation. I will provide evidence that the notional passive is distinct both structurally and semantically from the canonical Chinese passive and demonstrate the inadequacy of the topic-comment account of such constructions proposed by Li and Thompson (1981). My account of the middle will crucially define it as a resultative form in Chinese, appearing exclusively with Resultative Verb Compounds (RVCs). I will adopt Cheng and Huang's (1994) classification of RVCs into four verbal subcategories (unergative, transitive, ergative, and causative) and consider the syntactic and semantic properties of the resultative middle based on the argument structure of its component predicates. Using data, I will analyze whether these Chinese middle verbs pattern in a predictable, cross-linguistically consistent way, considerin~ syntactic distribution, aspectual composition, and semantic constraints on middle formation.
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