Adorning Materials in Middles

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.