Verbs of cutting in the middle construction: Examining the compositional cospecification of patientive vs. Agent-instrument middles

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to examine both prototypical Ergative-like middles (e.g. The cake cuts well) and their metonymically-motivated extensions, called Agent-Instrument middles (e.g. The saw cuts like a dream). The former incorporate as subjects patientive entities and the latter instruments. Both structures allow the incorporation of verbs of cutting, but they represent divergent portions of the action chain, and thus, they differ in the nature of their subject entities and their processes of compositional cospecification in terms of qualia structure. On the whole, on the basis of the prototype effects of the middle construction analysed here, they should be considered proper middles. This paper is based on a corpus study of contextualised examples (1700+) to examine their collostructional schema in the English middle construction (cf. Stefanowitsch and Gries 2003). Particularly, we explore the Verb + Adverb collocation found in middles by focusing on 29 predicates belonging to Levin’s (1993: 156) class of verbs of cutting, in combination with facility-/quality-oriented adjuncts (cf. Davidse and Heyvaert, 2007). Following a cognitive perspective, this paper examines the semantic roles of the subject referents analysed (patients and instruments), as well as their distinct processes of compositional cospecification as factors that contribute to the prototype effects of the middle construction. On the basis of corpus data, despite the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic common schemas found in prototypical Ergative-like middles and Agent-Instrument middles, the prototype effects of the middle construction highlight the divergent processes of compositional cospecification that these two types of middles follow. More specifically, a shift of semantic weight from a telic to a constitutive value occurs in Agent-Instrument middles, while there is lack of such a semantic shift in terms of qualia structure in prototypical Ergative-like middles with patientive subjects. Thus the middle construction cannot be considered as a discrete category of its own, but rather a prototype category (cf. Taylor, 1995; Hundt, 2007) that permits the accommodation of central and peripheral members. Consequently, in addition to the traditionally accepted structures in which the subject referent is a patientive entity, other less archetypal nominals can occur as middle subjects, particularly, instruments whose action affects implied and patientive entities.