Middles as Disposition Ascriptions

Abstract

Any analysis of middles has to account for the fact that across languages there is variation in their syntax. English and Dutch employ an unergative verb, whereas in French and Greek it is passives that can encode the middle interpretation. I propose to treat ‘middle’ as the targeted interpretation, which different languages express in different ways, depending on the means available to them with respect to encoding genericity. I qualify middles as disposition ascriptions to the internal argument, and argue that their core properties follow from this characterization.