A Study of the Middle Construction in English with Special Reference to Learner’s Dictionaries
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Xiaoli Zhu
Abstract
Although the middle construction has attracted significant attention from syntacticians, its identity still remains controversial and it is not treated as a separate grammatical category in any English learner’s dictionary. This article, based on the data collected from three English learner’s dictionaries, investigates the middle construction in terms of its syntactic and semantic properties and the constraints on its use. It shows that the three learner’s dictionaries treat the middle construction in inconsistent and problematic manners. The middle use of a verb is not distinguished from either transitive verbs with an implicit object or intransitive verbs, which may hinder English learners’ acquisition of the construction. The article proposes that middle verbs should be treated as a separate subcategory of verbs on a par with transitive and intransitive verbs so that learners will become more aware of them and learn to use them correctly.
©2013 Walter de Gruyter, Berlin Boston
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- Masthead
- Masthead
- Articles
- A Study of the Middle Construction in English with Special Reference to Learner’s Dictionaries
- Authentic or Artificial Materials: The Effects of Material-Types on L2 Motivation
- Foreign Language Anxiety: Past and Future
- A Contrastive Study of the Passive Voice in Journal Articles in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics
- The Effect of Language Proficiency on Focus on Form in Doing Dictogloss Task
- A Study of the Impacts of Participating in the “CCTV CUP” English Public Speaking Contest on the Contestants
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- Chinese Abstracts
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Masthead
- Masthead
- Articles
- A Study of the Middle Construction in English with Special Reference to Learner’s Dictionaries
- Authentic or Artificial Materials: The Effects of Material-Types on L2 Motivation
- Foreign Language Anxiety: Past and Future
- A Contrastive Study of the Passive Voice in Journal Articles in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics
- The Effect of Language Proficiency on Focus on Form in Doing Dictogloss Task
- A Study of the Impacts of Participating in the “CCTV CUP” English Public Speaking Contest on the Contestants
- An ERP Study on Metaphor Comprehension in the Bilingual Brain
- Chinese Abstracts
