A Contrastive Analysis Of Passive Voice In English, French And Chinese

Passive voice is the common linguistic phenomenon in English, French and Chinese which is used in daily life and writing. The passive voice is also one of the most familiar phenomena of language and culture. It is known that English, French belong to Indo-European language family while Chinese belongs to Sino-Tibetan language family, and English and French also belong to separate language groups—Germanic and Italic. To master the similarities and differences of them can make the second language acquisition and cultural communication much easier and more efficient. On the other hand, in recent years, a lot more students who are native Chinese speakers majoring in English will choose French as their second foreign language or French majors choose English as their second foreign language. Thus, studying the common grammatical phenomenon in these three languages will help these foreign language majors master languages better. In addition, with the stronger economic and political status of China, the study of Chinese has become a global trend, and many foreigners come to China for study or work every year. As one of the most difficult languages in the world, it has become a topic that how to learn Chinese well and master the structures and usages of Chinese grammar well. This paper attempts to make an all-round comparison on English, French and Chinese regarding the expressions of passivity in syntactic aspect and semantic aspect, and analyzes the profound reason for the differences—cultural differences.Contrastive methods are used to make a comprehensive comparison of passive voice in English, French and Chinese syntactically, semantically and culturally. Based on the theories of Contrastive Linguistics (Contrastive Analysis), through the analysis of specific examples, the comparison on subjects, verbs and prepositions, as well as the different semantic colors, religious background and thinking habits have been analyzed in detail, and some conclusions have been researched. There are similarities and differences of the passive voice of these three languages. The passive voice is used more frequently in English than in French and in Chinese. Different religious history and different thinking patterns also exert great influence on language use.