A Comparative Study Of Passive Sentences In Thai And Chinese Languages

Passive sentence is one of the basic sentence patterns of language. Either Thai or Chinese belongs to Sino-Tibetan languages, and both of them take function words and word order as means of passive expression. The research of passive sentence in Sino-Tibetan languages is mainly focused on the Chinese passive sentences. Therefore, its characteristics and historical evolution has been relatively clear. However, in non-Chinese, including the Thai language, the study of the passive sentence is mainly based on the description of passive language statements, and lack of historical analysis. So the study of passive sentences in non-Chinese must rely on the research results of Chinese passive sentence.The thesis focus on the study of the passive markers, passive sentence structures and history of evolution in Thai and Chinese languages, analyze them on the basis of description, and obtain the similarities and differences of them. Meanwhile, this thesis will further study over the similarities and differences, in order to show the universals and individuality of passive sentence in Thai and Chinese. And this research shows that : Passive markers in these two languages have great similarity. In Thai , the main passive markers come from the verbs which convey suffer meaning. And in Chinese, the notional words which contain the meanings of suffering , causative or giving are three notional word categories of passive markers. The passive markers what developed from the same category notional word have experienced a parallel grammatical process; Thai and Chinese are both SVO type language, passive sentences express meaning by using prepositions, auxiliary verbs and word order. Therefore, the structures of passive in two languages are very similar, but also have differences. Both passive markers and sentence structures all experienced processes from single to diversification. And the semantic also experienced a historical change, Thai passive influenced more by English in the aspect of semantic; Causative and passive sentences in Thai and Chinese share a close relation. In Chinese, there is a phenomenon that causative sentences can be used as passive sentences, and it result from the characteristics of Chinese itself. In Thai, there are causative clause embed in passive sentence. And its causative verb"hai"which convey the meaning of giving don't have a grammaticalization to become a passive marker.