A tightly-woven network of semantics and pragmatics in middle construction: with the grooming verbs

Abstract

In English, there are a variety of grooming verbs describing the act of grooming such as undress, wash, brush, bathe, shave, comb etc. However, every grooming verb cannot make this structure. Only some grooming verbs normally used as transitive verbs use an understood reflexive pronoun object, which is a semantically required but syntactically implicit argument, forming a middle voice construction. It is generally assumed that it needs a complex mapping among some semantic features to make the middle construction. And most of the previous researches have focused on these semantic components. Ill explore how this middle voice construction, in particular which needs an implicitly understood reflexive object, can be a representation of the dynamic interaction between the semantic and pragmatic factors by categorizing 10 grooming verbs.