A Cognitive Contrastive Study Of English And Chinese Passive Expressions

Passive expression is a language phenomenon that attracts a great number oflinguists and scholars’ attention at home and abroad, as it has a particular sentencepattern and expresses the passive meaning which is related to the active meaning.Many linguists and scholars have done a lot of researches on it from differentperspectives. Traditional grammarians have studied its structure and meaning;structuralism tends to give detailed description; the generative schools analyze itsformation by means of the ready-made generative grammar; and functionalists studyit from the angle of information and pragmatics. All of them have made greatcontributions to passive’s study; but they don’t probe deeply into the cognitivemotivation for its formation. Undoubtedly, with the introduction of ConstructionGrammar (CG) which provides a new perspective to study passive structure. So thisthesis will make an attempt to apply the theory of CG and Prototype to analyzingEnglish passive expressions (EPE) and Chinese passive expressions (CPE), aiming atexploring their essential characteristics and the similarities and differences betweenthem.According to CG’s view, construction is the basic unit of language. Goldberg(1995) held that “a construction is a form-meaning pair”. Then in the book publishedin2006, she defined that “Constructions are conventionalized pairings of form andfunction.” Since in both English and Chinese, there are several constructions whichare called passive, under that situation, the contrastive study between EPE and CPEbecomes very difficult. Based on the prototype theory, both English and Chinesepassives can be divided into two categories: one is prototypical passives containingagentless and agentful passives and the other one is non-prototypical passivesincluding stative passives and medio-passives.Based on this classification, a contrastive study has been made betweenprototypes and non-prototypes of English and Chinese passives at the semantic,syntactic and pragmatic levels within the framework of CG and prototype theory. Bytaking the constructional approach, we have succeeded in figuring out the similaritiesand differences between English and Chinese prototypical passives (“be” and “bei(被)”) which are generated by the same mechanism. Both “be” and “bei (被)”constructions in passives are generated by construing a causative event from the affected entity perspective. Through the analysis of the non-prototypical passiveexpressions between English and Chinese, we find that between English and Chinesenot every passive structure have a corresponding one. Like the new “bei (被)”construction, which contains to the non-prototypical passive category in Chinese.Compared with the traditional “bei (被)” structure, it has its own distinct semantic,syntactic and pragmatic properties. A systemic and comprehensive comparativeanalysis of EPE and CPE will be done in chapter four, which aims to uncover theirsimilarities and differences. Moreover, it is expected that this research can deepen ourunderstanding of English and Chinese and make a certain contribution to foreignlanguage learning and teaching and translations concerning English and Chinese boththeoretically and practically.