A Study on the Middle Construction in Mandarin Chinese--A Prototype Middle Construction Perspective

Abstract

English middle construction (MC) is one of the most heatedly discussed language phenomenon, however, disagreements and inconsistencies still exist among scholars as for the research scope of the Chinese MC. Based on the prototype elements of English MC, this paper compares the features of those constructions in different scholars’ paper and pin down which one is the prototype of Chinese MC and offer an order of their closeness to the prototype. Findings and explanations are demonstrated as follows: firstly, under the framework of prototype theory, it is argued that MC has its own prototype. The author assumes” the bread slices smoothly” as the English prototype for the high frequency of being cited at discussing the related topics of MC in literature. The prototypical properties of prototype elements are presented below: (1) implicit agent; (2) active in form; (3) simple present tense; (4) patient subject; (5) primary responsibility of subject; (6) adverb and experiencer sub-role of agent; (7) the aspect of the middle verb is either activity or accomplishment verb; (8) general modality reading; (9) causative and affected subject. Secondly, a closer look at Chinese MC is conducted, which reveals that different scholars have different ideas on what kind of construction is Chinese MC. Taking the prototype elements of prototypical English middle construction as criterion, the author compares the constructions in those scholars’ paper with them and finds out that they share different number of features. Construction in Yu &Si’s paper and parts of construction in Cao’s paper are regarded as typical Chinese MC because they share all the prototype elements of prototypical English MC. Their closeness to the prototype depends on the number of similarities they have in common. The author ranks these constructions from the most typical member to the worst member in the following order: Yu &Si, He, Chen, Ding, Cao, and GU. They structure around the prototype and exhibit graded centrality to the prototype. Thirdly, this paper also explains why the same construction can be classified into different grammatical categories, to be more specific, why the construction in Ding’s paper is regarded as notional-passives and construction in Chen’s paper is classified into the grammatical category of tough construction. According to prototype theory, category has fuzzy boundaries and a category may merge with neighboring category, therefore, MC merges with notional-passives and tough construction for they have overlapping areas.