Abstract

The indirect middle constitutes one component construction of the Middle Domain. As such, it has received comparatively little attention in the literature despite being closely related to the direct middle (and to body action events). This paper presents an empirical, quantitative analysis of the prevalence of the indirect middle voice construction in Romanian by examining a corpus of Romanian newspapers from the widely circulated newspaper Evenimentul (Mihalcea & Năstase, 2002). Findings from this analysis suggest that in Romanian, (1) the indirect middle is frequent and productive, (2) the indirect middle is closely associated with verbs depicting MENTAL events (rather than verbs involving a Recipient or Beneficiary), and (3) although various studies talk about “middle marked verbs”, in Romanian, the majority of verbs which occur with middle markers, can and do indeed occur without middle marking. This raises the question: to what extent are Romanian verbs which occur with middle markers strongly associated with this marking pattern? Moreover, if we assume that a strong association with middle marking is indicative of intrinsic middle semantics, can we identify connections between certain semantic verb classes and the indirect middle construction in Romanian?

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