Article

Adorning Materials in Middles

Yoon-kyoung Joh 1 ,
Author Information & Copyright
1Mokpo National University
Corresponding Author: Associate Professor English Language and Literature Department Mokpo National University 1666 Yeongsan-ro, Cheongye-myeon, Muan 58554, Korea , E-mail: ykjoh@mokpo.ac.kr

ⓒ Copyright 2020 Language Education Institute, Seoul National University. This is an Open-Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Received: Feb 10, 2020 ; Revised: Mar 14, 2020 ; Accepted: Mar 29, 2020

Published Online: Apr 30, 2020

ABSTRACT

This paper claims that adorning materials in middles can commonly be translated into adverbials since modality, negation, and focus can all be expressed using various types of adverbials. Through the analytical lens that views middle constructions as distributivity constructions that are essentially reduced to plurality, this common property among adorning materials in middles is highly interesting. Thus, this paper accounts for the adorning materials in middles in Joh’s (2016) analysis, which treats adverbials in middles as one of distributivity’s core arguments. This paper also discusses how adverbials that are implicitly inserted in middle sentences can be conditioned. To answer this question, this paper relies on the differentiating effect that Sohn (2003) examined, extending the previously proposed unexpectedness condition.

Keywords: middle; adverbial; focus; modal; negation

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