Syntactic Distribution Of Bei And Rang In Chinese Passive Construction And Its Functional Interpretation

This paper compares and contrasts the usage of Bei(被)and Rang(让), two functionwords in Mandarin Chinese, when used in passive-construction. One of the problems withprevious studies is that Bei and Rang are treated implicitly or explicitly as two variationsof equal status in such context. This paper, based on a medium-sized corpus, shows that inmany cases they are not interchangeable without affecting the meaning or stylisticcoloring of the sentences in which they appear. It begins with an examination of thesyntactic and semantic contrasts of Bei and Rang from the perspective of synchronicdistribution, followed by a dynamical comparison based mainly on quantitative analysis aswell as a specific description from five dimensions. In the second part, after presenting ahistorical overview and a critical review of the previous studies, the paper proposes a freshpostulation on the process of the emergence and development of Bei and Rang as passivemarkers respectively, showing that the cause and mechanism of their grammarticalizationdiffer from each other mainly in three perspectives. Finally, all the above-mentioneddifferences, synchronic or historical, are revealed and explained from the functional andtypological point of view. Taking the transitivity theory and bound theory as the mainaffective factors, it reaches the conclusion that while though Bei and Rang have similarfundamental functions when used as passive markers in contemporary Chinese, they existcomplementarily with interrelated semantic origins as well as mutually independentsyntactic property and semantic interpretations.