A Cognitive Analysis Of English Passives

The passive voice (the passive or passives for short) has received a great deal of attention in the linguistics literature. Different ideas have been offered about its meaning, form, function and classification. This thesis, on the basis of the experiential view, the prototype view, the attentional view and the prominence view in cognitive semantics, seeks to develop a framework within which various passive patterns can be harmoniously unified in the passive voice category as its members whether in terms of correlation between form and meaning or in terms of correlation between form and function.Chapter One introduces the study of the passive made in traditional grammar and modern linguistics. Chapter Two focuses on the theoretic framework and methods of employed in our study. First, we come to the conceptualization and classification of situations. Situations can be either simple or induced. For example, sentence " The boy is afraid" describes a simple spontaneous state while 'The boy is frightened (by the dog's barking)'" denotes a complex induced one. which consists of a sequence of subsituations with one of the subsituations involved acting as the cause of the whole event. For instance, sentence "The boy broke the window with a rock" can be interpreted as three related component events: 'The boy threw a rock at the window". " The rock hit the window" and " The window broke". So the whole event can be broken down into its component parts, each focusing on a different facet of the event.Prototype theory of categorization, Langacker's canonical event model and Croft's causal chain provide the theoretical foundation for our study.Prototype theory divides members of a category into two groups: central or prototypical members that have a cluster of core properties and peripheral or non-prototypical ones that lack some of the core properties. They are put together through their family resemblance and the boundary between them is fuzzy.According to Langacker's canonical event model, one discrete entity is driven into contact with another through the energy transmission between them. The viewer, when representing the scene, tends to focus his attention on a particular section of thescene from a particular vantage point.Croft's causal chain claims that simple events, which can be isolated from the rest of the causal network, consist of the three-segment causal chain of cause-become-state and they are end-point oriented, that is, possible verbs consist of the last segment (stative), the second and last segment (inchoative) or the whole three segments (causative).Construing scenes is one of our common cognitive and mental process, one important aspect of scene construal is embodied by the choice of perspective to a certain event. Perspective reflects the viewer's vantage point and focus of attention. Therefore the rest of the second chapter concentrates on the relation between , perspectives and participants and, more importantly, the relation between perspectives and passive patterns.Chapter Three explores the cause of passivization through the analysis of a great many examples. These analyses suggest that affectedness can be used more plausibly and convincingly to explain the validity or invalidity the passive versions of the actives.Based on the above study, Chapter Four puts the passive syntactic patterns into the grammatical category of passive voice as its members and organize them into tive groups: processual passives, inchoative passives, static passives, modifying passives and portraying passives.A large number of instances are cited in Chapter Five in the discussion of the pragmatic functions of the passive. New and old information along with their distribution in a discourse signals the change of contents of our cognitive activity in a certain speech event. The passive highlights the change of our cognitive perspective towards an event. This changed perspective is echoed by the change of the sequence of an utterance. When our attention shifts from the syntactic, semantic or information structure of an utterance to its social function, the macro-semantic structure of a discourse will be brought into contact with its pragmatic macro-structure. The passive, with its unique syntactic and semantic properties, contributes significantly to the building of the micro-structure and macro-structure of a certain discourse and the...