A Comparative Study Of The Structures And Functions Of English And Chinese Passives

Passive conception is pervasive in human experimental world, so the study of the passive voice has long been the hot spot in linguistic study. Linguistic schools differ from each other in the classification and designation of passives and different linguistic schools have different focuses in the study. The traditional approach mainly studies the transformation from active forms to passive forms. For instance, the formalists represented by Chomsky believe that passives share the same deep structures with the active sentences and are simply transformed from deep structures by applying a set of transformational rules. They aim to make an adequate description of these transformational rules but take little consideration of the pragmatic use of passives. Cognitive linguists, on the other hand, take the approach’human experienceâ†'conceptualizationâ†'schematizationâ†'linguistic forms’to study language phenomena. They mainly study the bidirectional relationship between language forms and the conceptualization of experimental world, with the focus on the following aspects:the syntactic and semantic prototypes of passive constructions, prototypical effects, construction meaning of passives, the extension form of passive constructions and the cognitive mechanism. However, the functionalists value the study of different language forms from the perspective of language functions aiming at the textual and interpersonal functions of passive voice. This thesis applies the latest theories from various schools such as prototype theory, ICM, construction grammar and Metafunction theory to the contrastive study of English and Chinese passive forms, generative mechanism and their functions in the hope of finding the universality of human experience reflected by the voice system in human language. Through the analysis of many pairs of passive sentences, this study finds that the generation of English and Chinese passives has the same cognitive basis. Metaphor is the mechanism through which some special English and Chinese passive constructions are developed. The functions of English and Chinese passives are similar in some aspects but different in other aspects, which may be caused by cultural differences. In a word, this study gives us a better understanding of passive voice and lets us see the explanatory power of cognitive theory.