Abstract
This study focuses on the syntax and semantics of the middle voice in Flannery O'Connor's fiction and the use of middle-voice constructions in thematic development of the sacramental in her fiction. The middle voice, although not syntactically unified in English, is typologically a construction, or collection of constructions, that signals an affected subject. Among the many specific syntactic constructions that are typologically related to the middle voice are passives, body-action constructions, and reflexives. In particular, this article examines the use of the body -part lexeme face in selected middle- voice constructions in O'Connor's fiction within the context of O'Connor's interest in the sacramental. The study gathers support for a thematic reading of O'Connor's middle-voice constructions through distributional contrastive data on the use of the lexeme face in O'Connor's fiction and the Brown Corpus. Thus, in part this article tests the limits of operational explorations of specific semantic and syntactic domains in individual literary authors.
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