The Polymorphism of Verbs Exhibiting Middle Transitive Alternations in English

1 Current approaches Over the last fteen years, following Perlmutter and Postal's work (1983), there has been constant interest in the problem raised by transitivity alternations. In their work Perlmutter and Postal argued that the single argument of intransitive verbs may either be generated as an object of the verb (unaccusative verbs) or as a subject (unergative verbs) (cf. Bassac, 1997). A sub-class of unaccusative verbs show both transitive and intransitive use such as in (1) and (2): (1) The artillery sank two ships. (2) Two ships sank. This transitive/ergative (or causative/inchoative) alternation must be distinguished from another alternation, the transitive/middle alternation exempliied in (3) and (4): (3) I read this book. (4) This book reads well. Prima facie middle constructions such as (4) appear as more constrained forms of (2): syntactically they need an adverbial, semantically their time reference cannot be speciic. More speciically the middle variant of the alternation exhibits the following two basic characteristics: 0 We would like to thank James Pustejovsky and Maya Arad for their helpful comments and suggestions. All responsability for errors are of course our own.