What makes a good middle? The role of qualia in the interpretation and acceptability of middle expressions in EnglishWe wish to acknowledge the insightful comments of two anonymous readers on an earlier version of this paper.What we here refer to as middles have been given a variety of other names: ‘activo-passive sentences’ (Jespersen, 1927), the ‘derived intransitive construction’ (OʼGrady, 1980), the ‘patient-subject construction’ (Lakoff, 1977; van Oosten, 1986), ‘mediopassives’ (Rosta, 1995), ‘thematic-subject sentences’ (Langacker, 1991: 334), and ‘agentless actives’ (Fellbaum, 1985). In terms of Kemmerʼs (1993) typological study of ‘middle voice’, Englishmiddles are somewhat untypical of the category. First, they bear no distinguishingmorphological marking. Second, of the fourteen major semantic values of middles identified cross-linguistically by Kemmer, the English construction exemplifies only the ‘facilitative’ category (Kemmer, 1993: 268), in which ‘an event is conceived of as proceeding from the Patient by virtue of an inherent characteristic of that entity which enables the event to take place’ (147).

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