2001 Volume 18 Issue 1 Pages 86-110
The purpose of this paper is to show that the middle is semantically related to the unaccusative and the unergative, which exhibit basically the same syntactic form as the middle, namely [NP-V]. By placing the middle in a cognitive network of intransitive constructions, we will attempt to account for the complex nature of the middle. We will show that there are middles structured based on related intransitives, while the middle has its own distinctive meaning and forms a prototype-based category of its own. We will argue that extensions of the network involving the middle are motivated by the Agent-like property of the entity denoted by the subject.
