From the Reflexive to the Middle Construction: What is ‘In-Between’? a Comparison Between English and Italian

This chapter aims to provide an initial cross-linguistic and cognitively oriented analysis of aspectual verbs in English and Italian. The focus is on the areas of overlap and contrast between the two languages, with the aim of broadening the theoretical understanding of how they work with respect to these verb types. Certain pairs of aspectualisers are examined contrastively, e.g. start/iniziare, begin/cominciare, keep and continue/continuare, stop/smettere, finish/finire and end/terminare, both by relying on OPUS, a parallel corpus of translated texts from the web that was queried with Sketch Engine, and on authentic occurrences retrieved in Google Books. The first part of the presentation analyses the syntactic behaviour of these predicates and highlights the similarities, but, above all, the differences between the types of constructions they can participate in. Their semantic features are then considered in order to show, among other things, how etymologically related verbs have evolved differently in the two languages; translation is used here as a heuristic tool in the investigation of inter-linguistic variation in that it brings to the fore the mismatches at different levels of analysis. Lastly, the cognitive operations underlying and motivating the various realisations of aspectual verb constructions in English and Italian are examined. It is shown that the differences between the two languages reside in their level of semantic specification, but also in the way in which they conceptualise the events that they reify.