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What makes a good middle? The role of qualia in the interpretation and acceptability of middle expressions in English

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2004

KIMIHIRO YOSHIMURA  and
JOHN R. TAYLOR
KIMIHIRO YOSHIMURA
Affiliation:
Faculty of Humanities, Kobe-Gakuin University, Nishi-ku, Kobe, [email protected]
JOHN R. TAYLOR
Affiliation:
Linguistics Programme, University of Otago, PO Box 56, Dunedin, New [email protected]
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Abstract

Middle expressions (The car drives smoothly, The book doesn't sell, These chairs fold up) have long fascinated students of the English language. This article examines some of the factors which contribute to the acceptability of such expressions. Rejecting a lexicalist approach, which aims to identify a class of middle-forming verbs, we propose, instead, a global characterization of the construction, with specific focus on properties of the subject referent in association with the semantics of the predicate. The middle construction, we argue, presents a non-Agent participant as primarily responsible for the potential actualization of the process designated by the verb phrase. The subject referent, therefore, has to be able to be construed as possessing properties which significantly facilitate, enable (or, as the case may be, impede) the unfolding of the process in question, while, at the same time, the contribution of the Agent to the process is backgrounded. We explore this thesis with specific reference to the qualia structure of the subject nominal.

Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 8 , Issue 2 , November 2004 , pp. 293 - 321
Copyright
Cambridge University Press 2004

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Footnotes

We wish to acknowledge the insightful comments of two anonymous readers on an earlier version of this paper.What we here refer to as middles have been given a variety of other names: ‘activo-passive sentences’ (Jespersen, 1927), the ‘derived intransitive construction’ (O'Grady, 1980), the ‘patient-subject construction’ (Lakoff, 1977; van Oosten, 1986), ‘mediopassives’ (Rosta, 1995), ‘thematic-subject sentences’ (Langacker, 1991: 334), and ‘agentless actives’ (Fellbaum, 1985). In terms of Kemmer's (1993) typological study of ‘middle voice’, Englishmiddles are somewhat untypical of the category. First, they bear no distinguishingmorphological marking. Second, of the fourteen major semantic values of middles identified cross-linguistically by Kemmer, the English construction exemplifies only the ‘facilitative’ category (Kemmer, 1993: 268), in which ‘an event is conceived of as proceeding from the Patient by virtue of an inherent characteristic of that entity which enables the event to take place’ (147).