The middle subject has agentivity.This study tries to contrast the subject agentivity strengths in English and Chi-nese middles,in light of such three perspectives as prototype,semantic roles and distance iconicity,based on the investigation into middles in sample corpus.The major findings are as follows:based on the attributes of the proto-agent and the proto-pa-tient,the subject agentivity strengths in English and Chinese beginning-oriented middles are the highest,while those in the end-oriented middles the lowest;as for the proportion of instrumental subjects,English middles are higher than Chinese mid-dles;based on distance iconicity,the subject agentivity strengths in Chinese middles are higher than those in English middles.The study concludes by applying the linguistic typology theory to explain the differences in the subject agentivity strengths in English and Chinese middles.This study contributes to the better acquisition,mastery and use of English and Chinese mid-dles,and illustrates the practical values of the multi-perspective collaborative argumentation method.
prototypesemantic rolesdistance iconicityEnglish and Chinese middlessubject agentivity strengths
NETL
NSTL
万方数据
