Conversation Linguistics Passive Sentences In Japanese Research

Passive sentences in Japanese have been vastly researched and studied, most focusing on individual sentences. Yet it is sometimes difficult to distinguish the relation as well as subjectivity and objectiveness in passive sentences. Thus the approach of context and even larger linguistic units are necessary to be invited in the study of passive sentence.This essay makes a detailed investigation on passive sentences in Japanese based on conversations. In conversational linguistics, passive sentences are categorized into result presentation, emotional expression and metalingual expression. In conversations, context means not only the chronological lingual relations, but also the non-verbal context, such as the purpose of speech, participants in the conversation as well as their relations, etc. The author has made extracts from the Asahi Newspaper reports on the yellow sand, in order to study the usage of the three kinds of passive sentences in the China-Japan conversation on environment issues.The study finds out that in the Asahi news reports, when mentioning the yellow sand in Japan, result presentations are usually used mainly to deliver messages, whereas reporting about the yellow sand in China, emotional expressions are more likely to be applied, however, without distinct subjective factors, as most of these reports are initiated based on Chinese domestic news reports. metalingual expressions are basically used in weather forecast and some comments. Therefore it is fair to say that the Asahi news reports on yellow sand are mostly objective.