Passive Generalizations
Li, Charles N. & Thompson, Sandra A. (1981).
Mandarin Chinese - A Functional Reference
Grammar. Los Angeles: University of California
Press.
Hung, Tong T.N. (2005). Understanding English
Grammar – A Course Book for Chinese Learners
of English. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University
Press.
McEnery, A. M. and Xiao, R. Z. (2005) Passive
constructions in English and Chinese: A corpusbased contrastive study . In: Corpus Linguistics
2005, 14-17 Jul 2005, Birmingham, UK
Sentence structure
• In English the DO of the active verb becomes the
subject in the passive voice and is normally placed
at the beginning of the sentence.
• In Chinese the DO noun phrase, that is the thing or
person affected by the action of the verb, is placed
in the initial position. This DO is followed by the
passive coverb bei, which introduces the agent of
the action. The verb occurs in the sentence-final
position.
Adversity
• In English the passive voice can be used in both
nonadverse and adverse situations.
• The bei construction in an ambiguous situation
sometimes indicates an adverse situation in a
Chinese sentence.
– The message carried by passive sentences with verbs of
perception or cognition is most often negative.
– The number of bei constructions that do no express
adversity is increasing, particularly in the written
language of modern China.
– Passive voice in English often does not correspond to
the bei construction in Chinese. The converse is also
true.
Other Differences
• The direct object of the verb in Mandarin
serves as the topic but not subject in the
“topic-comment” construction.
• Thus the topic prominence of Mandarin
together with the restriction of the bei
construction to adverse messages combine
to reduce the usage of the passive in
Mandarin Chinese.
Focus on the agent of the
transitive verb (DO)
• English uses passive for this purpose
• Chinese can use the shi-de construction in
nonadverse situations and the bei
construction in adverse situations.
A few characters can replace bei
• Gei, jiao and rang can replace bei in certain
situations depending on the dialect of
Mandarin spoken.
• English has nothing to replace by in a
passive sentence.
McEnery and Xiao’s conclusions
From corpus
1. Syntactic Passives
•
First obvious difference is that syntactic passives are by
far more frequent in English than in Chinese. Why?
– Chinese passives can only occur in dynamic events (Li calls these
disposable) whereas English can be both dynamic and static.
– Chinese passives typically have a negative semantic prosody (i.e.
adverse) whereas English passives do not (see below).
– English overuses passives, especially in formal writing and
Chinese avoids it.
– They found that only 20% of English passives were translated into
Chinese in a parallel corpus
2. Bei or its substitutes and by
•
Bei or its substitutes cannot be left out,
whereas by can be left out However, the
agent can be left out of both of them.
3. Chinese advsities are more
• Over 50% of the passive constructions marked by
all syntactic passive markers in Chinese occur in
adversative situations.
• English had 15%-37.7% depending on the kind.
• Note the Chinese beibu “be arrested,” beifu “be
captured,” beigao “the accused,” beihai “be a
victim,” and beipo “be forced.”
• English order of importance for passives: neutral,
negative and positive.
• Chinese: negative, neutral and positive.
4. Syntactic functions
• Passives are basically verb constructs and
used as such in both languages
• English use as verbs is 95%
• Chinese use is 76% depending on the
passive marker. Gei, jiao, etc.
• Chinese passives in the predicate position
typically interact with aspect.
– This is a good topic for further investigation.
5. Genere
• English passives occur more frequently in
informative and fiction genres, especially
official and academic articles.
• Chinese has the lowest occurance of
passives in these categories. The hightest
occurance is in mystery stories and religious
writing.
Recommendations for teachers
• The two langauges are quite similar but when and
how they are used are different.
• Students need to be taught the differences
especially in academic writing.
• Reasons also have to be stressed so students
understand why they are wrting the way they are.
• Do you teach this as a change from the Chinese
bei etc. to the English passive or do you teach
them as two different things?
• Your insights?