Aspect matters in the middle

This paper addresses the variation that the middle construction attests cross-linguistically. In one class of languges middles behave as passives, whereas in another class they pattern with unergative structures. My proposal is that this variation is not accidental, and that it reduces to variation in the morphosyntax of aspect. I put forward a semantic treatment of middles as disposition ascriptions to a Patient/Theme argument. I then show how the morphosyntax of the dispositional generic operator that is argued to be present in such structures determines the syntactic behaviour of middles. Genericity may be morphosyntactically encoded by means of grammatical aspect, in particular in languages where such aspectual distinctions as perfective/imperfective exist. The proposal is that the level at which the generic operator is present correlates with the level at which middles are derived. For instance, in Greek and French, genericity is morphosyntactically encoded and middles are parasitic on passives. In such languages, middles are derived in the syntax, in virtue of the availability in the syntax of the relevant operator. In Germanic languages, by contrast, aspectual distinctions are not encoded in the morphosyntax, and middles are syntactically unergative. This is implemented in terms of a presyntactic derivation.