Middles in English

Abstract

This paper explores a new way of explaining the generation of middles and ergatives in a synchronic description of English that is inspired by historical evidence. In current syntactic studies, there are two basic approaches to the generation of middles and ergatives, one which maintains that intransitives are derived unidirectionally from corresponding transitives and another which proposes that transitives are uniformly derived from corresponding intransitives. I, in contrast, propose a bidirectional view of this derivational process, whereby some transitives are basic and give rise to intransitives, while in other cases it is the intransitive which is basic and which yields derived transitives. I propose that it is always the more cognitively salient form which is basic. As a metric for judging the relative cognitive salience of corresponding transitive and intransitive forms, I look to historical evidence; I hypothesize that the more salient form will always be first to appear in the language.*