LEXICAL-CONSTRUCTIONAL INTEGRATION IN NON-PROTOTYPICAL ENGLISH MIDDLES : THE ROLE OF HIGH-LEVEL METONYMY AS A MOTIVATING FACTOR

The main aim of this paper is to consider the issue of lexicalconstructional integration in circumstantial English middles with instrumental and locative subjects, exemplified respectively by Narrow tyres manoeuvre more easily and The tennis court plays a bit slower (cf. Davidse and Heyvaert 2003, 2007). I will first explore the lexico-semantic mechanisms that may sanction the ascription of a verbal predicate to these extended uses of the middle construction where there is no causative element and the “affectedness” constraint needs to be ruled out. Drawing upon Ruiz de Mendoza and Mairal Usón (2007, 2011), I will also try to determine to what extent high-level metonymy may actually apply as an external motivating factor in the explanation of these non-prototypical uses of the middle, also showing how contextual and discourse-pragmatic factors cooperate with each other to enhance the metonymic interpretation of the “circumstantial” middle type.


INTRODUCTION
As Davidse and Heyvaert (2003: 67) point out, the existing analysis of the English middle account for a limited set of prototypical middle constructions, overlooking the importance of the circumstantial type, where the subject is not an affected entity and there is no causative element, as illustrated in (1) and ( 2): (1) [of tyres:] They handle better, brake better, grip better.(Yoshimura and Taylor 2004: 295) (2) [about a tennis court:] It is slightly coarser, so it plays a bit slower.(Davidse and Heyvaert 2007: 47) In order to determine the semantic and discourse-pragmatic factors that contribute to the acceptability of the middle construction in these extended uses of the construction, I will examine the properties of the Subject entity in association with the properties of the verbal predicate (see Yoshimura and Taylor 2004), proposing that the acceptability of the middle construction is to a great extent determined by cognitive and discourse-pragmatic factors.This paper is organized as follows: section 2 reviews the lexical-semantic and conceptual constraints which have been traditionally associated with the middle construction in the linguistic literature, exploring the constraints on the predicate and analyzing the role of the "conducive" subject and of the adjunct.Drawing mainly on authors like Goldberg (1995), Davidse and Heyvaert (2007), and Lemmens (1998), I will reject a lexically-based approach, assuming that the acceptability of the middle construction is determined by the semantic and pragmatic meaning of the construction as a whole.Section 3 explores the cognitive and discourse-pragmatic factors that may legitimize non-prototypical middles of the circumstantial type.Following Ruiz de Mendoza and Mairal Usón (2011: 76) I will try to determine to what extent high-level metonymy may actually apply as a "co-licensing factor" in the explanation of these extended uses of the middle construction type with verbs which do not involve a change of state.Section 4 offers some final remarks.

CONSTRAINTS ON THE PREDICATE: THE TRANSITIVE AND AFFECTEDNESS CONSTRAINTS
In the literature the middle has been frequently described as being restricted to transitive verbs with affected objects (see e.g.Keyser and Roeper 1984, Fellbaum and Zribi-Herz 1989, Levin 1993). 1 The affectedness and transitive constraints are used by Levin (1993: 26) to explain the data in (3) and ( 4): (3) a. Bill pounded the metal.
(4) a. Bill pounded the metal flat.b.This metal won't pound flat.
The object of pound is not affected by the action of the verb, so this verb is compatible with the middle construction "only in the presence of a resultative phrase, which contributes a state that results from the action of pounding" (Levin 1993: 26).But the notion of affectedness does not account for all the facts, as Fagan (1992: 65) rightly points out.A verb like photograph, for example, forms an acceptable middle, as illustrated by the example in (5), where the inherent properties of the subject entity are not modified in any way by the action of photographing. 2 (5) She photographs well.(Fagan 1992: 65) The main problem with a lexically-based approach like Levin's is, as argued by Lemmens (1998: 4), "that she sees the choice of constructions in which a verb may occur as wholly determined by the verb's semantics and, as a result, fails to recognize that constructions themselves are meaningful".As Goldberg (1995: 24) points out, it is not the case that constructions simply "impose" their meanings on "unsuspecting" verbs as "the meaning of constructions and verbs interact in nontrivial ways".
Non-prototypical middles of the circumstance-type, illustrated in (1) and (2) in §1, clearly invalidate the "change of state" constraint, as they are acceptable middles which include non-affected entities as subjects.Example (1), which construes an Instrument as subject, does not entail that the tyres can be handled and braked, but that the tyres will enable the potential driver to handle and brake the car better (see Yoshimura and Taylor 2004: 295;fn 5).Example (2) also rules out the transitive constraint, as play here profiles an intransitive process, depicted in its relation to the locative entity construed as the subject (see Davidse and Heyvaert 2007: 52). 3  Other illustrative examples containing circumstances of instrument and location with transitive and intransitive (or predominantly intransitive) verbs are presented below:4 b.Subject as Instrument (6) That brush paints well.(Davidse and Heyvaert 2003: 67) (7) Narrow tyres manoeuvre more easily.(Davidse and Heyvaert 2003: 65) PILAR GUERRERO MEDINA Journal of English Studies, vol. 11 (2013) 133-147 2 Contrary to this analysis, Fellbaum and Zribi-Hertz (1989: 29) claim that the "process referred to by photograph (…) affects the subject-theme by converting it into an image".In Heyvaert's (2003) semantic typology the example She does not photograph well illustrates the result-oriented focus of the middle type (see §2.3).

3
The verb play could also receive a transitive reading.However, as Davidse and Heyvaert (2007: 47) observe, it seems clear that the implied agent in (2) is not depicted as "interacting with the court as a sort of patient".

c. Subject as Location
(8) This surface races well.(Davidse and Heyvaert 2003: 67) (9) The upper river fishes well in spring.(COCA) 5As these examples reveal, the middle construction is much more versatile in terms of verb classes and participants it accepts than has been acknowledged in the literature (see Davidse and Heyvaert 2003: 71), and it is thus difficult to constrain the class of verbs that are compatible with the construction.6I agree with Ruiz de Mendoza and Mairal Usón (2011: 73) that lexical class ascription can in fact be a licensing or blocking factor when it comes to lexicalconstructional interaction in syntactic alternations.However, verb classes cannot be created ad hoc on the mere basis of constructional needs, and there are cases like the examples above which are difficult to explain.

THE ROLE OF THE "CONDUCIVE" SUBJECT
As argued above, the acceptability of the middle construction cannot be exclusively determined by the lexical specifications of the main verb.The inherent properties of the subject referent (usually enhanced by appropriate contextualization) are also essential in explaining middle formation in English.In Yoshimura and Taylor's (2004: 293) terms, the subject referent "has to be able to be construed as possessing properties which significantly facilitate, enable (or impede) the unfolding of the process in question".
Authors like Fagan (1992) and Iwata (1999) have proposed a modal analysis of the middle construction.Fagan (1992: 54) paraphrases the meaning of (10a) as in (10b), implying that the middle construction realizes the modal notions of possibility or ability: Against this analysis, which emphasizes the agent-like responsibility of the subject entity ("The siding can be nailed/cut easily by anyone who tries"), 7 Davidse  and Heyvaert (2003: 68) propose that the modality in middles is associated with the inanimate entity, and not with the implied Agent, and that it has to be understood in terms of Talmy's (2000: 409) force-dynamic notion of "letting".As Davidse and Heyvaert's (2003: 168) paraphrase in (11b) suggests, the circumstantial middle in (11a) entails that it is normally possible to carry out the process designated by the verb because the antagonist (the tennis court) does not offer any resistance to the action exerted by the agonist (the implicit agent): 8 (11) a.That tennis court serves fast.
b.That tennis court "allows/enables" fast serving.

THE ROLE OF THE ADJUNCT
Middles normally require an adjunt in order to be acceptable. 9The literature has centered on middle examples foregrounding the facility, feasibility and quality aspects of the relationship between the subject and the process.In Heyvaert's (2003: 133-137) typology the facility-quality-and feasibilty-oriented middle types, 10 exemplified respectively in (12), ( 13) and ( 14), are supplemented with two further semantic types: destiny-, and result-oriented middles, illustrated in ( 15) and ( 16).The five middle types distinguished by Heyvaert are connected to the occurrence of specific adverbial modifiers: (12) The window opened only with great difficulty.(Langacker 1991: 334)  See also Van Oosten (1986: 85).8 Similarly, a patientive middle like The ladder fixes quickly and easily under the window ledge entails that "the ladder is designed in such a way that it lets one fix it quickly and easily to the window ledge" (Davidse and Heyvaert 2003: 68-69).9 In English the range of adverbs is restricted to three semantic types (Dixon (2005(Dixon ( (1991)): 449): SPEED (slowly, fast, quickly, etc.), VALUE (well, badly, properly) and DIFFICULTY (easily, with/without difficulty). 10These three types fall under Kemmer's "facilitative" situation type, in which "an event is conceived of as proceeding from the Patient by virtue of an inherent characteristic of that entity which enables the event to take place" (1993: 147).Under this type the author includes "situations involving expressions of ease/difficulty of occurrence of the event", "quality judgments", "comparisons of quality" and "expressions of intrinsic ability of an object to undergo a particular process" (147).Examples ( 12), ( 13) and ( 14) illustrate process-oriented variants of the middle-type, focusing more generally on the potential unfolding of the depicted process.Facility-oriented middles take "facility" adverbs like easily; qualityoriented middles include adjuncts of value and comparison; and feasiblity-oriented middles, which "focus on whether the properties of the entity construed as Subject make a process possible" (Heyvaert 2003: 134), are typically adjunctless.
In (15) the conduciveness of the subject is evaluated in terms of "destiny", indicating "where an entity can or should be placed" (around little hands) or mentioning "how this can be realized" (with Velcro) (Heyvaert 2003: 135).Finally, the example in ( 16), where the adverb well triggers a result-oriented reading, focuses on what the result is when the process of photographing is carried out (Heyvaert 2003: 134). 13 Heyvaert's (2003) semantic typology shows that the middle construction may focus on different aspects of the interaction between the non-agentive Subject and the verb, and it is the adverbial modifier which typically indicates which facet of this interaction is being focused on (see also Davidse and Heyvaert 2007: 67).

COGNITIVE FACTORS
As shown above, the great versatility of the middle construction type, not limited to patientive and facility-oriented middles, makes it difficult to generalize on the properties of the construction and to identify a class of middle-forming LEXICAL-CONSTRUCTIONAL INTEGRATION IN NON-PROTOTYPICAL ENGLISH MIDDLES: THE ROLE... predicates in English.The affectedness and transitive constraints, frequently put forward in connection with the middle construction, are clearly unable to account for non-prototypical middles of the circumstance-type.We need to look beyond the verb and beyond the semantics of the construction in order to give a more accurate account of the the semantic and conceptual restrictions operating on middle formation in English.
According to Ruiz de Mendoza and Peña Cervel (2008: 253), "many aspects of transitivity in grammar are essentially a matter of cognitive operations on elements of a high-level propositional model" that they call the action frame.Ruiz de Mendoza and Mairal Usón (2007: 45) explore the inchoative and middle alternations, and argue that "they are grounded on high-level metonymy". 14The authors postulate the double metonymy PROCESS FOR ACTION FOR RESULT as the cognitive mechanism underlying all the different cases of the middle and "instrument-subject" construction.In a prototypical patientive example of the middle construction like The bread cuts easily, an action (cutting bread) is presented as if it were a process (the bread cuts) that is assessed in terms of the inherent difficulty in achieving a result (the bread gets cut without difficulty). 15he circumstantial middle This soap washes whiter assesses the outcome "of making use of the instrument of the action" (Ruiz de Mendoza and Mairal Usón 2007: 46). 16t should be emphazised that processes may be regarded as subdomains of the "action" frame "only to the extent that is possible to retrieve an implicit agent" (Ruiz de Mendoza and Mairal Usón 2007: 42).In the middle construction (as in the inchoative construction) "an action is figuratively treated as a process" and "the process becomes a subdomain of the action for which it stands" (Ruiz de Mendoza and Mairal Usón 2011: 76). 17The Agent is not entirely erased from the conceptualization (Yoshimura and Taylor 2004: 300) but minimized to the extent that the action is now presented as if it were a process.
As Langacker (1991: 334) points out, a sentence like This ice cream scoops out quite easily necessarily involves an Agent which does the scooping out: "we do not […] envisage the ice cream wielding a scoop and lifting itself out of the container.And while the ease or difficulty of carrying out the action is attributed to inherent properties of the subject, it can only be assessed as easy or hard in relation to the capability of an actual or potential agent." As shown in the expanded versions of the circumstantial middles in ( 17) and ( 18) below, the deprofiled Agent may even be recovered from the surrounding discourse (see also Ruiz de Mendoza 2007: 27 in this regard): (17) To do this you will need a sturdy roof-rack that attaches to the guttering of the car and, rather than relying on your knot-tying ability, you can buy special straps that make securing the board, mast and boom far easier.(BNC AT6 260) (18) The Big Wood appeals to anglers of all abilities, and is a perfect place to polish your skills with the help and instruction of your guide.This river fishes well with dry flies, nymphs and streamers.(Google)18 Sentences ( 17) and ( 18) present a transitive or intransitive process in its relation to an instrument or a location, but they necessarily imply an Agent.
As stated above, middles contain a modality component.However, they do not realize the modal notions of ability and possibility (see §2.2) but involve intrinsic modality concerned with "a person's or thing's intrinsic disposition, which has the potential of being actualised" (Radden and Dirven 2007: 246).In view of this fact, I will argue that the "letting" property of the subject which is foregrounded in the middle construction is possibly inferred from two metonymic operations: PROCESS FOR ACTION FOR RESULT and ACTUALITY FOR POTENTIALITY -the latter instantiating the "cognitive principle" OCCURRENT OVER NON-OCCURRENT (Kövecses and Radden 1998: 66)-which would account for the fact that an "actual" (occurrent) source is used to activate a "potential" (nonoccurrent) target. 19These two cognitive mechanisms could be subsumed under the label in ( 19): The middle construction focalises the habitual result of a potential action, and presents this result -usually recognised as such in virtue of the implied Agent's previous experience with the subject entity-as a property of the entity which is designated as the clausal Subject.
We have seen how metonymy involves a shift in profiling within the cognitive "action" domain.However, there is another descriptive construct (also involving the focusing of attention) which is required to properly describe the semantic and cognitive import of the middle construction: this is trajector/landmark alignment, which Langacker (2008: 70) presents as another kind of prominence to distinguish the meanings of relational expresions.The middle construction invokes an agentive process but selects the "theme" (mover) as "trajector", i.e. "the entity construed as being located, evaluated or described" (Langacker 2008: 70).
As Davidse and Heyvaert (2007: 66) observe, the subject in middles is foregrounded in purely subjective terms, not in terms of case hierarchy.In the authors' words, "its very construal as a conducive entity in relation to the 'letting' modal involves subjective speaker-assessment".And it is the inherent "letting" properties of the Subject entity which motivate its construal as Subject by the speaker (see §2.2).

CONTEXTUAL AND DISCOURSE-PRAGMATIC FACTORS
There must be some contextual and discourse-pragmatic triggers cooperating with each other to yield the double metonymy presented in (19).The metonymy will be activated in an appropiate situational context (usually contexts of product promotion, advertising campaigns, sports registers, etc.), where the positive properties of an entity are enhanced.The circumstantial middle in ( 20) is illustrative in this regard: (20) […] there is still significant "recall" of such ancient slogans as "Guiness is good for you" and "Persil washes whiter" (BNC F9D 318) The acceptability of the middle Persil washes whiter derives from the implied contrast existing between this particular brand and all the opposition (see Lemmens 1998: 78;Yoshimura and Taylor 2004: 296).
Drawing on Pustejovsky's (1991) theory of qualia structure, Yoshimura and Taylor (2004: 305-308) discuss the conceptualization of nominal referents.There are four basic roles that constitute the qualia structure for a lexical item: the Constitutive Role, the Formal Role, the Telic Role and the Agentive Role.Pustejovsky's (1991: 426-427) qualia theory is summarized in ( 21): Constitutive qualia and telic qualia are crucially involved in the acceptability of middle expressions.A sentence like *The car kicks easily is not acceptable since "the kicking of a car cannot be plausibly related to any qualia which make up our conceptualization of a car" (Yoshimura and Taylor 2004: 309).Lemmens (1998: 80) makes a similar claim when he states that "the properties emphasized in the middle construction are often those for which the entity has been designed in the first place".
Contextualization, however, can favour the foregrounding of the relevant qualia, as in Yoshimura and Taylor's example in ( 22), where the "discourse setting enriches the construal of the corner" (2004: 312), and "legitimize" middle expressions with verbs whose semantics appears to be incompatible with that of the construction, as in ( 23) and ( 24 In ( 22) the discourse setting enables the speaker to foreground the enabling properties of this particular location by establishing a contrast with a different location.In (23) the speaker's construal of the situation determines the acceptability of the middle, triggering its metonymic reading (see §3.1).Finally, in (24) the speaker is clearly a specialist in horse-racing, familiar with all the technicalities.It is here assumed that "good to firm" is the kind of ground that horses enjoy and that it is normally prevalent when there hasn't been too much severe weather.
As Davidse and Heyvaert (2003: 70) point out, "the implied reference to properties of the Subject is part of the semantics of the construction, but what these characteristics are has to be inferred contextually and is not part of the linguistic meaning of the construction." 23

FINAL REMARKS
This paper has attempted to reconcile Davidse andHeyvaert's (2003, 2007) and Ruiz de Mendoza and Mairal Usón's (2007Usón's ( , 2011) ) functional-cognitive approaches to the analysis of the English middle in order to offer a more satisfactory account of the complex interplay between lexico-semantic, cognitive and discourse-pragmatic factors in non-prototypical middles.It has been proposed that high-level metonymy acts a motivating factor of the English middle, whose constructional organization centres on its modal "letting" meaning and on the contextually-implied properties of the enabling subject (Davidse and Heyvaert 2007: 56-62).
It has also been argued that the speaker's selection of a non-prototypical trajector as the theme in the middle construction is strongly motivated by contextual discourse-pragmatic factors.As Hendrikse (1989: 368, 371) observes "syntactic structures are instantiations of pragmatic options" and "the actual choice of any of the options is (...) determined by the context." 24

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10) a. [about a kind of siding:] It nails easily.It cuts easily.b.It can be nailed easily.It can be cut easily.LEXICAL-CONSTRUCTIONAL INTEGRATION IN NON-PROTOTYPICAL ENGLISH MIDDLES: THE ROLE...

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21) a. Constitutive Role: the relation between an object and its constituents, or proper parts.b.Formal Role: that which distinguishes the object within a larger domain.c.Telic Role: purpose and function of the object.d.Agentive Role: factors involved in the origin or 'bringing about' of an object.
Reviewers may note that this disk is very heavily composed of the music of Carlos di Sarli.That is okay, because I am a Di Sarli fan.His music dances well.I have many of the recordings done by other orchestras of Di Sarli's work.I am a Di Sarli fan.(Google) 21 (24) If without rain the ground rides slower than good to firm, then it is wrong and unfair to owners and trainers with fast ground horses.(Google) 22 LEXICAL-CONSTRUCTIONAL INTEGRATION IN NON-PROTOTYPICAL ENGLISH MIDDLES: THE ROLE...