On the Property Reading of Middles

Abstract

[Abstract] The English middle construction (This book reads well) is usually approached from the point of view of the derivational operations that account for the transitivity alternation. However, hardly any attention has been devoted to its semantics. This paper offers a semantic and pragmatic account of English middles. It focuses on the un-agentive, property-predicational nature of the construction, which is made to follow from the stativisation process involved in middle formation. This is linked to its pragmatic function, which is discussed from a relevance-theoretic perspective.