The Research Of The Asymmetry Phenomena Between Active Voice And Passive Voice Of English

The world consists of many different materials and the complicated relations among them. Language is the reflection of the true world. Because these relations in the material world should be expressed by languages, there must be a type of words to play the role of expressing the complexity. And English verbs thus play the most important role of conveying the relations which happen in the material world into languages. So voice is a category or mechanism which exists in every language and it is one of the most important parts researched by many linguists from both home and abroad.English voice contains active voice and passive voice. Within the past several decades, different grammarian schools, linguists and scholars have performed some researches on the voice of the English verbs and they have already got great achievements in their own fields. They performed many researches about the formation, the prototype and the functions of active voice and passive voice respectively. This study attempts to explore the asymmetry phenomena in the usage of the voice of English verbs as well as in the transformation between active voice sentences and passive voice sentences.The author, who learns English as a foreign language, firstly collects materials that reflect the asymmetry between active voice and passive voice from grammar works and the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English as the research data, with the inspiration by the great interests in the asymmetry phenomena. According to the existing theories related to English voice and the classifications of English verbs by linguists, the thesis divides the asymmetry phenomena into two kinds: the form asymmetry and the semantic asymmetry between active voice and passive voice of English. And then with the guidance of the classification of the verbs of Halliday and the related theories, such as Transformational-Generative grammar, Systemic-Functional grammar and Cognitive Grammar, the research classifies the asymmetry phenomena and analyzes the underlined reasons.The major findings of the thesis are as follows: firstly, the form asymmetry phenomena of English voice are originated in the behavioral characteristics of the action expressed by English verb, which is the decisive factor in the use of English voice; secondly, the transformation between the active voice sentence and corresponding passive voice sentence may lead to the some displacements of the elements, which may cause the semantic changes substantially sometimes; thirdly, there are several kinds of words as quantifiers, qualifiers and references which may influence the choice of English voice; fourthly, the choice of voice is also constrained by the language structure, the discourse function, the pragmatic function and the perspective of human beings.With the analysis above, this research is hoped to provide some practical reference in the learning of English voice and the actual use of English verbs and other related fields to those who learns English as a foreign language.