Kim, Sang-Ki. 1998. The Middle Construction and Agentivity. Studies in Modern Grammar 13, 25-39. This paper has characterized the nature of agentivity in the middle construction. Evidence of various types suggests that although agents cannot be overtly expressed in English middles, they are present underlyingly. Instrumental with-phrases may appear in middle constructions. The presence of an instrument implies the existence of an agent to use it. Other arguments can be made for the presence of an agent in the middle. Phrases such as with (no, little, a little, some, a lot of) effort and (with, without) difficulty, for example, imply agentivity, since effort is energy expended by an agent. Middles have much in common with unaccusatives. Both types of predicate have one argument, a non-agent, which shows up as the subject in surface structure but is an underlying object. The difference between the middle and the unaccusative is that the former has an agent in underlying lexical semantic structure, while the latter has no agent at any stage in the derivation. I have used a variety of syntactic and semantic tests to differentiate middles from unaccusatives.

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