A Prototype Contrastive Study Of English And Chinese Passive Voice

As a common yet complex linguistic phenomenon, the passive voice in English and Chinese has been a long-term hot research topic for people. During the past several decades, various linguistic schools, grammarians and scholars both home and abroad have conducted numerous research on the passive voice from different perspectives, and great achievements have been scored in various fields. However, the current contrastive research on English and Chinese passive voice is disperse and unsystematic on the whole. The reason is that the various and complex forms of passive voice in English and Chinese has made it difficult to contrast them thoroughly and systematically.Based on the previous research conducted by various scholars home and abroad, this thesis follows the guidance of the prototype theory to categorize the passive voice to set up a relatively comprehensive and reasonable category of passive voice between English and Chinese. The thesis then adopts the contrastive method to analyze their corresponding similarities and differences from the cognitive perspective, and hopes to uncover the deep mechanism underlying the similarities and differences between English and Chinese passive voice to deeply grasp the cognitive essence of the passive voice.According to the prototype theory, this thesis divides both the English and Chinese passive voice into prototypical and non-prototypical ones. The prototypical passive consists of the agentless passive and agentful passive, and the non-prototypical passive consists of the stative passive and the medio-passive. The English agentless passive is composed of "NP+Be+V-en", such as "The building was destroyed." The Chinese agentless passive is composed of "NP+bei+V+ (Compliment)", such as"李明被打(死)了".The English agentful passive is composed of "NP1+Be+V-en+By+NP2", such as "The building was destroyed by the earthquake". The Chinese agentful passive is composed of "NP1+bei+NP2+V (+ Compliment)", such as"他被警察打了,我被他们说糊涂了".The English stative passive is composed of "NP+Be+V-en (Adjective)", such as "The window is broken". The Chinese stative passive is composed of "NP (Topic)+V (Comment)", such as''桌子擦了"The English medio-passive is composed of "NP+Copular Verb +V-en+(Preposition+NP)", such as "I was quite surprised at her words". The Chinese medio-passive is composed of "Patient-NP+V(受/遭/得到,etc)", such as"看完电影,我的心灵受到很大震撼"。From the cognitive perspective, the similarities between the English and Chinese prototypical passives lie in that they are generated by construing a causative event from the perspective of the affected entity, that is to say, the subject of a passive sentence must be an affected entity, and the event expressed by the passive sentence must be a causative event. The differences between the English and Chinese prototypical passives mainly lie in the different degrees of affectedness. In English, the entity denoted by the subject of a passive sentence must be at least affected by the action denoted by the verb, however, in Chinese not only must the entity denoted by the subject of a passive sentence be affected by the action but a change must also be caused in it. This explains why sentences such as"鞋子被穿了"is unacceptable while"鞋子被穿破了"is acceptable. Besides, the English and Chinese prototypical passives differ in the actual realization of subjectivity. The English passive takes the patient's point of view while the Chinese passive does not take the causer's point of view. This difference accounts for the fact that in Chinese the maleficiary which is not directly involved in the event denoted by the verb can become the subject of a passive while in English it cannot. For example, in Chinese we can say"他被杀了父亲",while in English we cannot say "He was killed father", but we can say "His father was killed".In terms of the English and Chinese non-prototypical passive, they are both generated through construing a causative event as a state, thus they possess a similar conceptual structure which describes the resulting state of an affected entity and focuses on the final state of the affected patient. Their difference lies in that the English stative passive is represented by an adjectival V-en and a copular be, because the English stative passive is derived from an adjectival construction which expresses a state. In contrast, the Chinese stative passive is realized by the semantic relationship between the patient and the following verb, because the Chinese stative passive is derived from a topic-comment construction which expresses a state.