Functional Analysis Of Passive Voice In English Legislative Texts

As a very common yet complex linguistic phenomenon, the passive voice has often been the subject of many linguists and grammarians. However, most of the studies are from the syntactic perspective. In resent years, the rapid development of functional grammar provides a new angle for the study of the passive voice: functional analysis.As a stylistic marker, passive voice is widely employed in the texts with high objectivity and formality, as in English journalistic and scientific texts. It is also frequently used in English legislative texts and displays certain features in this type of text. Up to now, most of the studies of the passive voice in these texts are confined to those of formal characteristics, while the studies on the roles and functions of the passive voice are still far from enough.Based on Halliday's theory on the three metafunctions of language, this thesis studies the roles and functions the passive voice performs in realizing the ideational, the interpersonal and the textual functions of the legislative language. This study combines the study of the passive voice with that of the text, which is different from mere grammatical studies and therefore reflects the pragmatic value of the passive voice. In ideational function, the passives in legislative texts are closely related to the material, verbal and mental processes in the transitivity system. They express the same propositional meaning with their active counterparts but take different angles as the starting point. In interpersonal function, the passives can perform the speech functions of statement and command. They can also express the scales of the obligation by expanding the predicator. The textual function of the passives in the legislative texts is the focus of the thesis. Liu Chao (2004) points out that the passive voice has six textual functions in English journalistic texts including theme-stressing, theme-introducing, theme-transferring, focus-protruding, focus-contrasting and cohesion-developing. Are these functions are also performed by the passive voice in English legislative texts? Are there other textual functions the passive voice can perform? After studying abundant examples extracted from ten legislative texts from the perspectives of thematic structure, thematic progression, information structure and cohesion system, the author finds that the passive voice often serves five textual functions in English legislative texts. These textual functions include topic-stressing, focus-protruding, focus-contrasting, information-balancing and cohesion-developing. The five functions work together to help create a structurally and semantically coherent text.The thesis consists of six chapters. Chapter One introduces briefly the purpose and the importance of the study, the data collection and the outline of the whole thesis. Chapter Two reviews previous theoretical and practical studies of the passive voice: the previous theoretical studies concentrate on the studies of the passive voice in traditional grammar, transformational generative grammar, cognitive grammar and the systemic-functional grammar; the previous practical studies are mainly about the studies of the passive voice employed in various types of text. Chapter Three is the theoretical framework of the thesis: Halliday's theory on three metafunctions of language. Chapter Four mainly analyzes the characteristics of the passives in the legislative texts. Chapter Five is the main part of the thesis which analyzes the functions the passives perform in realizing the ideational, the interpersonal and the textual functions in the samples. Chapter Six summarizes the results of the study and points out the limitations of the present study.The thesis aims at a better understanding of the passive voice employed in English legislative texts through functional analysis of the passives in legislative texts. It is expected that this study can be helpful for the further study of legal language.