Abstract: The research method of corpus linguistics is employed to describe how well Chinese students are able to use middle constructions by exploring the syntactic features of subjects， verbs and modifiers in such structures， as well as the semantic relations among the three components. The results show that Chinese students can use both patientives and locatives as subjects， various forms of verbs as predicates， and prepositional phrases and adverbials as key modifiers to describe the properties and states of subjects. Compared with native speakers， Chinese students are inclined to choose the same verbs， and use fewer forms of verbs， zero modifiers and atypical middle constructions. The frequency of middle construction use does not show any statistically significant difference between Chinese students and native speakers.

Key words: middle construction, interlanguage, written language, syntax, semantic feature