Modern Chinese Passive Sentence Usage

This paper investigated the distribution of Modern Chinese passive construction in conversation, fiction, news and academic register, especially the emergency ratio of agent of passive construction and the distribution of verb in this kind of construction. Passive construction includes the one with passive marker and the one which has no passive marker and the passive interpretation can only be gotten from the semantic relation between the subject and the verb of this kind of construction. The investigation of the texts showed that the place of the registers on the narrative-critic and oral-literal dimensions affected the use of passive construction. It consists of five chapters.Chapter 1 is introduction. First of all, it introduces the research aim, i.e. investigating the used model of passive construction of modern Chinese in the practical text. Then, it defines passive construction and analyzes the shortages of previous study.Chapter 2 indicates the theory, i.e. usage-based grammar, and exhibits the analytic courses.Chapter 3 exposes the distribution of passive construction in different registers and regulations of emergency ratio of agent.Chapter 4, based on the distribution of common verbs in kinds of registers and passive constructions, indicates that the stronger the narrative is, the higher the transitive is, moreover, the transitive of passive construction with marker is higher than the opposite.Chapter 5 concludes that features of register determine the distribution of passive constructions and the category of verbs.