Middle Constructions Research Articles

Os usos do clítico ‘se’ em artigos científicos – mecanismos de impessoalização na escrita acadêmica

Este trabalho está inserido em um contexto maior, o projeto SAL (Systemics Across Languages) desenvolvido em parceria com pesquisadores da China, Argentina, México e Tailândia que procuram entender as características específicas e universais que partilham as línguas. Este artigo objetiva analisar os diferentes usos e funções que o clítico se desempenha em artigos científicos. As funções excluídas são: o reflexivo e a conjunção, pois seus usos são claramente descritos e não estão relacionados ao desfocamento de participante. A base teórica, a Linguística Sistêmico-Funcional de Halliday (1994, 2004), tem como foco a língua em uso e permite analisar as escolhas gramaticais do autor em textos (escritos ou falados) com base no contexto de cultura e de situação em que se realizam. Os usos do se podem ser classificados em três categorias: se em construções médias – as ações que acontecem por si só, um processo é causado por ele mesmo (self-caused process); se em construções com desfocamento de participante que ocorrem por ser irrelevante sua menção, parte do estilo do gênero acadêmico/científico e se em construções agnatas – verbos que quando se ligam ao se têm significados relacionais e/ou existenciais.

Voz media en toba (guaycurú)

Este artículo analiza construcciones de voz media en la lengua qom lɁaqtaqa o lengua toba (flia. Guaycurú). La voz media se codifica con el paradigma verbal n-, un conjunto de índices pronominales que expresan persona, número y afectación del sujeto o agente de la acción (Censabella 1998, 2002). Argumentamos aquí que la lengua toba manifiesta características típicas de un sistema de voz básica activo medio (Klaiman 1991). Sobre la base de esta hipótesis y, especialmente a partir de la compatibilidad con paradigma verbal n-, describimos el comportamiento de 185 raíces del corpus. Concluimos que la voz media en este idioma es estructural, regular e incluye un continuum heterogéneo de construcciones medias que no sólo se relacionan con detransitivización semántico-sintáctica o reflexividad.

Ergatives and Middles in Comparison and Contrast

This paper delves into some basic aspects of passive, ergative, and middle constructions in terms of transitivity, thematic relation, and syntactic derivation. Accordingly, I propose that, first of all, passives are transitive as the passive verb takes two arguments, an Agent external argument and a Theme internal argument. They are seen to be derived via NP-movement, in which the Theme internal object moves to subject position to get Case. Second, ergatives are also considered to be transitive in that they take the two arguments corresponding to those of passives. The external argument in ergatives, however, is argued to carry a non-human Causer, which is normally saturated and does not appear on the surface. The internal argument allegedly carrying a Theme theta-role is assumed to move to subject position to satisfy EPP. Finally, middles are argued to be intransitive, taking only a single internal argument with an Experiencer theta-role. The Experiencer internal argument moves into subject position to satisfy EPP and to place itself in a higher position than a Theme argument, subsequently conforming to Thematic Hierarchy, assumed in Larson (1988).

A Typological Study of Anticausative, Middle and Medio-Passive Constructions

This paper aims to suggest Middle and Medio-passive categories in Korean with cross-linguistic data. K. Kim(2009) argues that there are three kinds of...

Ergativity in Korean

In this paper I investigate the ergativity in Korean. I argue that the nal-li- type verb is the ergative verb, claiming that the causative suffix is the same as the passive suffix in Korean. The agent can never be the subject of an ergative verb. The differences between Korean ergative verbs and English ones are i) that the former have the (passive) suffixes, whereas the latter have no suffixes at all; ii) the causer can show up overtly with the former, whereas it cannot with the latter. Next, I argue that nal- type verbs are middle verbs, showing that they are very similar to nal-li- type ergative verbs in nature so that the former can be an alternative if the latter are not available. The causer is less likely to show up with the middle verb than the ergative verb, given that the former has no passive suffix added. The nal- type middle verb in Korean is quite different from that in English in i) that it does not describe a property of its subject; ii) it does not need a modifier nor allow only the present tense. Finally I investigate the matter of derivation in ergative constructions, concluding that the ergative/middle constructions are not derived from the causative, or vice versa, with the supporting evidence that the nal-li- type causative and ergative/passive constructions in Korean derived from nal- type middle constructions (or some transitive constructions).

On the Middle Construction

This paper concerns some crucial properties of the middle construction. It is well-known that middle constructions do not behave in a uniform way so that it is quite hard to characterize the construction. First, it refuses to be parasitic on the independently established structures including ergatives, unaccusatives and passives. Hence, it claims its own structure. Second, this paper deals with the generic reading and the agentivity in the middle construction. To empirically attest its generic reading, typical tests for stative are adopted here. The middle construction behaves just like statives. This paper also seeks to find where an agentivity reading comes from in the construction. If the agentivity has something to do with the presence of an agent. an agent should be either semantically or syntactically active. None of the evidence in the literature in favor of the existence of the agent turns out tenable.

Syntax and subtext: Diachronic variables, displacement and proximity in the verse dramas of Shakespeare and his contemporaries

In this study of serious verse drama (tragedies and history plays) by Shakespeare and his contemporaries of the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods, language is seen as a resource for achieving immediacy or distance, situating the play either in a contemporary socio-political framework or else in a national-historical past. The empirical basis for this claim lies in a study of archaic versus innovative syntactic constructions. It is shown that in the early 1590s Shakespeare and his contemporaries made very frequent use of verb-second in declaratives, and tended to avoid do-support in interrogatives. In early Jacobean serious drama, however, “verb-second” had almost disappeared and do-support rose to around 50% of interrogative contexts. Whereas in the earlier period an archaic effect was created by retaining Middle English constructions that ordinary usage had by now either abandoned, or was in the process of doing so, the language of Jacobean serious drama aligned itself on the respective ambient linguistic norms. It is argued that these syntactic preferences conveyed a stylistic effect suitable for representing distance and/or alterity, either with respect to the past or to a foreign context: both perspectives involved late Elizabethan national identity concerns. Conversely, the adoption of contemporary linguistic norms in Jacobean high drama achieved an effect of proximity, facilitating “here-and-now” allusiveness to contemporary themes, especially those of court intrigue and cynical acquisitive materialism.

As construções médias nos artigos científicos de Linguística


 Este artigo analisa as construções médias utilizadas em artigos científicos da área de Linguística, coletados aleatoriamente da plataforma Scielo. Com base na perspectiva da ergatividade (Halliday 1985, 1994) e Halliday & Matthiessen (2004), as construções encontradas são analisadas, procurando descrevê-las com base nas escolhas dos Meios e no contexto em que ocorrem nos artigos. As ocorrências foram obtidas através do uso de ferramentas computacionais que possibilitam o trabalho com grande número de textos. A análise revela que essas construções são utilizadas em diferentes seções para se apagar a identidade do autor ou de outros autores citados nos textos.

A Minimalistic Approach to English Middle Constructions

A Minimalistic Approach to English Middle Constructions

Correlates to Middle Marking in Dena’ina Iterative Verbs

While recent studies have attempted to find a unified motivation for the Athabaskan middle voice, middle marking in iterative verbs, which are sometimes middles, is generally less well understood than in other middle constructions. Scholars have cited syntactic intransitivity, semantics, or some combination thereof as motivation for when iteratives are marked as middles. In this paper, we present a quantitative analysis of iteratives from traditional Dena’ina (Athabaskan, Alaska) narratives. This analysis strongly suggests that while grammatical transitivity plays a role in the triggering of overt morphological marking of middles, verb meaning plays an even more important overall role, and thus supports the assumption of a semantically unified class of middle verbs. More specifically, we show that in Dena’ina iterative verbs, middle marking is more likely to occur when the spatial starting and ending points of the action of the verb are undifferentiated.

Light and heavy reflexive marking

In Romanian, the middle marker se is employed to encode five distinct situation types: reflexive, reciprocal, (medio-)passive, inchoative and impersonal. This work identifies the relationships among the different uses of the marker and puts forward explanations for them within a cognitive, functional framework. Following studies such as those by Faltz (1985), Haiman (1983), Haspelmath (2005), Kemmer (1993ab), Lakoff (1977), Manoliu-Manea (1994, 2000), Maldonado (1992, 1999), Manney (2000), and Yoshimura and Taylor (2004), the current paper gives a synchronic account of the Romanian Middle Domain, its organization and the relationships between the various middle constructions found inside it. Findings suggest that the semantic property of low elaboration of events (introduced by Kemmer, 1993ab) constitutes the common denominator among the different uses explored. This work provides an insight into Romanian itself, as well as a contribution to cognitive theories of human language and responds to the call for more data and further investigations of middles cross-linguistically (see Smith, 2004).

A Study on the Middle Constructions in English

A Study on the Middle Constructions in English

Estonian Middle Semantics with Evidence from Discourse

This paper presents arguments for recognizing a middle voice in Estonian. The claim that the semantics of middle-marked verbs differs in a substantial way from the semantics of other intransitive constructions leads to the examination of the discourse pragmatics of these constructions, and the relationship between discourse patterns and their valency and argument properties. Various topicality measures show that the argument participant in middle clauses lies between that of the sole participant (S) in intransitive clauses and the O of active transitive clauses. The results regarding the discourse behaviour of middle arguments constitute new evidence for the view that middle constructions differ from ordinary intransitive verbs, despite structural similarities, and mark a unique range on the scale of transitivity exhibited by verbs in Estonian.

Überlegungen zu zwei Unterschieden zwischen der Mittelkonstruktion des Deutschen, Englischen und Niederländischen

This paper discusses two problems about middle constructions in German, English and Dutch. The first question is why a reflexive pronoun occurs only in German middle constructions. After having discussed expressions for grooming actions and inchoative situations, it is pointed out that only in German reflexive pronouns can occur in sentences in which the external argument is suppressed. Following Steinbach (2002), it is then argued that only German reflexives can mediate the linking of the syntactic subject to the internal argument. The second question is why middle constructions can be formed from so-called double object verbs in German, but not in English and Dutch. After having pointed out that middle constructions are not compatible with an accusative argument, it is claimed that morphological coding patterns for indirect objects contribute to the language difference: Whereas in English and Dutch indirect objects remaining in middle constructions are encoded in accusative, they are expressed in dative in German.

Deverbal -er suffixation as the equivalent of the clausal Subject-Finite unit

In this paper, the position is defended that deverbal -er suffixation establishes a relation between an entity and a process which is strikingly similar to the clausal Subject-Finite relation. It is first shown that nonagentive -er nominals (e.g. kneeler, squeezer, sleeper) cannot be explained as semantic extensions of the agentive prototype (e.g. sinner, preacher). Instead, the Subject analysis is argued to provide a better generalization for the agentive and nonagentive instances of -er. In particular, the various types of nonagentive -er nominals are shown to be systematically equivalent to the Subject of middle structures (e.g. this book reads slowly) and Setting-Subject constructions (e.g. this train sleeps 100 people). It is, moreover, argued that -er also construes equivalents to the basic deictic function of the finite verb in the clause, i.e. to tense and modality: lexicalized -er nominals (e.g. destroyer ‘warship’) imply a modal or potential meaning; recategorizations (e.g. the Welsh destroyer of Del Harris's hopes) are temporally linked to the speech event. The correspondences between the clausal Subject-Finite unit and -er nominalization, finally, are shown to significantly elucidate the semantics of the -er suffix.

Middles and Reflexivity

This article investigates the argument structure of middle predicates. It argues that middle verbs syntactically project the entire argument grids of their active counterparts; however, middle verbs, like passive verbs, project the external (Agent) arguments of their active counterparts as adjuncts. These demoted Agent arguments can appear, in middle constructions, as the objects of for-PPs.

Passive and Middle Constructions in Korean

In this paper, I have shown evidence that the potential Korean middle construction (K2) is a passive, adducing five pieces of evidence: (1) spontaneity, (2) the existence of an agent, (3) non-stative, (4) non-generic, and (5) no requirement of adverb modification. It will also be classified under a morphological passive, since it carries the same morpheme as the suffixal passive and has properties of the canonical passive.

The syntax and semantics of middle constructions: A study with special reference to german

The syntax and semantics of middle constructions: A study with special reference to german

The middle construction and the syntax-semantics interface

English and Dutch middle verbs have a grammatical subject that is the corresponding transitive verb's object. In this paper we will account for this fact by invoking the properties of a pre-syntactic level of semantic representation and its interplay with syntax proper. We will argue that the grammatical subject of a middle is its actual external argument, and we will propose a model of projection of arguments that allows for this. We will show that other special properties of middle constructions follow from the way the verb's logical subject is represented at the pre-syntactic level of representation. In particular, it will be shown that the Affectedness Condition on middle formation is not a condition on the type of argument that can appear as the middle verb's grammatical subject, but that its effects and some exceptions to it naturally follow from this representation. Our model will also allow an account of Dutch impersonal and ‘adjunct’ middles.

The Syntax and Semantics of Middle Constructions: A Study with Special Reference to German

Introduction Properties of middles Constraints on Middle Formation Lexical versus syntactic derivation of middles Middle Formation Let middles Concluding remarks Tables Appendix Data sources References