The middle

The third major construction in English is the middle. Typical middles listed in grammars of English are given in (34). They have to do with permanent properties of entities.

Many middles have what is called as ‘episodic’ interpretation, that is, they denote a single episode or event. Examples are in (35).

Example (35a) refers to a single event of selling; (35b) refers to a single, albeit lengthy, cleaning event; (35c) refers to a property of a particular course at a particular period of time; and (35d) refers to a single event of a bomb failing to guide and crashing.

Some analysts see the middle construction as having a strong resemblance to the passive, but there is little justification for this view. (The name ‘middle’, which corresponds to the ancient name given to the equivalent construction in Classical Greek, captures the idea that this construction is neither fully active nor fully passive but in the middle.) The obvious point to make is that English middle clauses and English passive clauses share no syntactic properties; middles can only contain one noun phrase and the verb is active, whereas passives can contain a subject noun phrase and a second noun phrase preceded by by, as noted above. The middle construction has no auxiliary verb, whereas the passive has the auxiliary verbs be or get.

What type of participant is denoted by the subject noun phrase in middle clauses? In passive clauses, the subject noun phrase refers to an entity undergoing some process, that is to a Patient. The vase was/got broken and This candidate was elected are answers to questions such as What happened to the vase? and What happened to this candidate? Does the subject noun phrase in a middle clause denote a Patient? The sentence His novels sell very well has been said to present the books as ‘selling themselves’, and this analysis seems to be on the right track. There is no contradiction between two examples referring to the same novel such as This novel reads very well and It is a pity that nobody reads this novel nowadays. It is quite possible to say These cars sold very quickly last week and then add in spite of the inept performance of our new sales staff. The expert knitter or tailor who declares This wool knitted up without any trouble and The cloth was cutting beautifully is not taking credit but giving it to the wool and the cloth.

Example (35b) above was uttered in a television documentary dealing with the River Mersey. The interviewer had been talking to various people about the initial part of the cleaning-up programme, namely the enforcement of legislation to stop factories discharging noxious materials into the river. Thereafter, the river had simply to be left to, as it were, get on with the task of removing the poisons already in the water, and it was in this context that (35b) was uttered.

The person uttering (35d) was attributing blame to the bomb, which refused to respond to the guiding signals and crashed, killing civilians. Example (35c) was uttered by a participant in equestrian cross-country trials, and the burden of the message was that the course permitted accurate jumping of the obstacles and good times for the circuits of the course.

In the light of the above, what role can we assign to the referents of subject noun phrases in middle clauses – Agent or Patient, or some other role? The ‘middle’ construction is so-called because it is felt to be intermediate between the active and passive constructions Part of the in-between-ness of the construction lies in the question of role, but the problem can be solved if we recognize that, like so many concepts in linguistic analysis, central prototype instances have to be distinguished from peripheral instances. The subject noun phrases in (35a–d) do not refer to prototypical Agents; the referents are not human, do not exercise will-power and do not have goals and intentions. Nonetheless, they are not presented as Patients.

A solution that resolves the contradictions is to regard the subject nouns in the middle construction as Neutral (between Agent and Patient) but as controlling the situations. The cars, by their qualities, determine the rate at which people buy them; the river Mersey, with the powers of cleansing and rejuvenation inherent in clean, flowing water, determines how long it will be before the pollutants are removed  altogether; the course, with its fences of a certain height and width, and its obstacles and the state of the ground, determines how successful the horses and riders will be. Finally, the strong impression was given by the spokesman who uttered (35d) that it was the bomb’s fault that civilians were killed.