A Contrastive Analysis Of The Grammaticalization Of English And Chinese Syntactic Passives

Previous studies on contrastive studies of English and Chinese passives were mainly performed synchronically on the syntactic forms, semantic meanings, pragmatic uses or discoursal functions, yet a better understanding of the similarities and differences between them and better use of them can be achieved with a contrastive analysis of the grammaticalization of English and Chinese passives. The current research attempts to describe the grammaticalization of typical English and Chinese syntactic passives in terms of process, motivations and mechanisms and to make a contrastive analysis between them in these aspects both diachronically and synchronically to look for the cognitive foundations of passive expressions, the evolutionary similarities and differences in the grammaticalization of them, and thereby locate the motivations and deep mechanisms behind their morpho-syntactic forms in the two languages.English syntactic passives involved in this thesis are mainly"be"passives and"get"passives. The description of their grammaticalization showed that the grammaticalization of English syntactic passives mainly concerns three parts—the auxiliary, the participle and the agent. They experienced the choice of auxiliaries, the competition of adjectival and verbal participles and the choice and expression of the agent. The collapse of the case system, cognitive factors and language contact motivated these changes, while reanalysis or metonymy and subjectification are the deep mechanisms.Chinese syntactic passives mentioned in this thesis are mainly passives with"bei","jiao1","jiao2","rang"and"gei"as the markers. The description of their grammaticalization showed that"bei"was grammaticalized as a passive marker from a verb, while"jiao1","jiao2","rang"and"gei"grammaticalized from causative meanings of these verbs. Metaphor, reanalysis and subjectification are the mechanisms underlying the changes with metaphor as the most important one, while grammatical, pragmatic and cognitive factors motivated the process.The contrastive analysis between the grammaticalization of English and Chinese syntactic passives indicated that there are similarities and differences between the grammaticalizations of English and Chinese syntactic passives both synchronically and diachronically. Diachronically, English and Chinese syntactic passives share the same prototype, the same cognitive model, and general principles of grammaticalization while they underwent different pathways and exhibited different degrees of grammaticalization, the degree of the grammaticalization of English syntactic passives is higher than that of Chinese syntactic passives; synchronically, English syntactic passives are different from Chinese ones in overall frequencies, syntactic features, syntactic functions, semantic properties, distributions across genres and discourse functions, but all the differences are the result of the origin of passives in each language and their different paths to grammaticalization. The study also indicated that there is a complementary distribution between"be"passives and"get"passives in English as well as passives with"bei"and passives with other passive markers in Chinese, as"be"passives and passives with"bei"are often used in more formal writings while"get"passives and passives with other markers are more often used in oral language. And short passives are used more frequently in both languages than long passives, but the two points need to be proved by further studies.The reasons for their similarities may mainly lie in that they share the same prototype and cognitive model, while the differences may be attributed to different language types of the two languages with English a synthetic language which depends much on inflections and Chinese an analytic language which mainly depends on word order, and the mental preference and pragmatic habit of different peoples may also have caused such differences.However, this thesis mainly investigated the grammaticalization of some typical English and Chinese syntactic passives in theory, corpus studies were not conducted as a result of lacking proper equivalent language corpus, and it still can not cover all the passive constructions in English and Chinese, as it mainly dealt with the simple and typical passives in both languages. So further studies can be conducted within wider range of passive expressions to include more passive expressions in both languages and corpus-based studies should be conducted to provide more scientific and more convincible explanations for the different degrees of grammaticalization of passives in the two languages with careful selection of corpuses.This study can provide implications for second language learning and teaching. As over-use, under-use and malformed use of passives often occur among students and such errors are due to the insufficient knowledge about the passive structures in both languages, their differences on the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic levels, especially the relationship between grammatical forms and semantic meanings of passives in both languages, as in many cases English passives do not convey a passive meaning, while in Chinese, the passive meaning may not be expressed by passive forms, and the increase of awareness between grammatical forms and meanings can help correct such errors. This study also provides clues for the study of language universals. English and Chinese have very similar surface structures and such forms are grammaticalized by very similar motivations and mechanisms, this showed that there are some universals among all human languages, so further studies can be conducted in searching for language universals by comparing the grammaticalization of linguistic forms.The present study provides a new perspective for contrastive studies on English and Chinese passives and a combination of diachronic and synchronic methods was used, thus a comparatively systematic and comprehensive explanation of the grammaticalization of English and Chinese syntactic passives was provided.