earticle

영어

The purpose of this paper is to explain the historical development of the English Middle, by investigating its semantic structure and analyzing it as a topic-prominent structure. The theme-subject in the English Middle is analyzed as an affected arguments; the adverbial phrase is an inherent property of the English Middle, and the implicit arbitrary agent is interpreted as people in general or one. This paper concludes, basically following Li and Thompson(1976), that the English Middle has the topic-comment structure, which is characteristic of topic-prominent language. The English Middle is thus defined to have originated to satisfy the discourse requirement for topic-prominent structure in English. The large number of the English Middle in early modern English is attributed to the fact that English has become a completely subject-prominent language in this period and the need for topic-prominent structures motivated the use of the English Middle.