A Cognitive Study Of English And Chinese Passive Constructions

As a very important language phenomenon and particular sentence pattern, passive construction (PC) has received much attention and interest from linguists and scholars at home and abroad. In the grammar circles, the study of passive construction has gone through great progress from the elementary to the profound, which reflects the linguists' different cognition to passive construction. Passive construction's study under different linguistic theories are many, some are on a certain respect of passive construction, some focus efforts on one language-English or Chinese or another language, some are the contrastive study but only contacting its surface. Seeing that structurists'study tends to description without deep researches on its forming mechanism and formalists'study stresses its classification and properties and borrows the ready-made generative grammar without strong explanation power, this paper tries to apply new linguistic theories-Construction Grammar (CG) theory and idealized cognitive models (ICMs) theory to analyzing the similarities and the differences between the two constructions and to explore passive construction's existing evidence and essential characteristics.Goldberg's Construction Grammar Theory thinks that construction i.e. the form-meaning pairing is the basic unit of language and has its corresponding meaning and pragmatic function to form even if there were no specific words. As an integer, construction is greater than the sum of its components and has its syntactic and semantic features independent of its components. So, a construction is judged in the grammar if its meaning and/or form is not compositionally derived from its components or other existing constructions. Verb and construction interact each other. Construction affects verbs that can be filled into this construction and verbs influence the meaning of the construction. The meaning of any specific expression results from integration of both the construction and its verb. Category and Prototype and ICM theories think things in the world display prototype effects and are divided into typical members and peripheral members. Construction Grammar believes construction also conducts prototype effects. Its prototype members occupy a central position and marginal members are situated in the edge location. Based on the same human cognition basis, English and Chinese passive constructions show some universal attributes as a whole but manifest the differences in subsystems and the correspondence between specific words, then they can be regarded as two categories for they each have their own typical members and peripheral members with respective different properties.Passive construction as a category is one kind of basic grammatical categories in human thought. As two integral framework, English passive constrution (EPC) and Chinese passive construction (CPC) almost have the same construction meaning that the patient argument suffers influence caused by the predicate verb's action. However, these two constructions own their separate characteristics. According to Construction Grammar, passive construction can be classified into 4 sub-constructions: patient-oriented passive construction, agent-oriented passive construction, object-oriented passive construction (only applying to Chinese) and complement-oriented passive construction (only applying to Chinese). This paper attempts to apply Construction Grammar, category and prototype and ICM theories as guiding framework. It first analyzes the construction meaning of EPC and CPC, and then proves the existence of the two constructions respectively under Construction Grammar. Then, it analyzes and compares EPC's and CPC's syntactic and semantic properties and semantic constraints. Next, it turns to prototype and ICM theories to do a comparative analysis of their idealized models and atypical forms, their continuum and their non-complete-correspondence. Thus, the research can dig out formation reason and complicated mechanism concealed in the passive construction.As a form-meaning combination, passive construction is not the mechanical adding of the syntactic and semantic components and also can't be strictly predictable from other existing sentence patterns but has its own integral meaning and constrains its verbs that can enter the construction. This thesis makes a comparative analysis of EPC and CPC under Construction Grammar in order to disclose their similarities and differences. The study can prove the plausibility of using Construction Grammar for analyzing English and Chinese sentences, esp. the special ones. Moreover, it has great guiding significance in foreign language teaching and Second Language Acquisition and also is helpful to English-Chinese translation; meantime it can provide experience for the study of other special constructions such as existential construction, cleft-focusing construction, interrogative construction and the like.