A Syntactic Contrastive Study Of English-Chinese Passive Constructions

The passive is a common and comparatively complicated linguistic phenomenon. In the long run, the use of the passive is favoured by the linguists both at home and abroad. The fact that the foreign learners focused their minds on the study of the passive can be traced to the last century while at home it will find its way back to the ancient period when the old English was used, which shows us that from the diachronic perspective, the use of the passive is quite agelong. When taking the synchronic element into consideration, various learners have tried to explain it at different levels and areas, for instance, in the aspect of formalism, cognitive linguistics, pragmatics and translation. In order to express their special opinions, the learners at home have also put forward "The Auxiliary Theory", "The Prepositional Theory", etc. From the above, we can conclude that the study of the passive is of great value when concerning period. This passage will contrast the similarities and the differences of the passive voice in English and the sentences that contain the word "bei" in Chinese, which is helpful for the use of the passive.By reading the literatures and collecting the correlative materials, the writer have found that the former learners'study on the structure and forms of the passive all rested on the superficial level, and couldn't explain its forming procedure from a deeper level. Only the Minimalist Approach of Chomsky has profound opinions and penetrating theories. Accordingly, the writer here uses the VP Shell Theory and Feature Checking Theory etc. in the generative grammar The Minimalist Program (1995) to give the English passive sentences and those Chinese ones with the mark "bei" a comparison from the perspective of syntax. The writer discovers that because the Chinese passive structures are complex and the study gained by The Minimalist Program (1995) is not enough, the lexicon and computing process of Minimalist Inquiries:The Framework (1998) is taken to make a further study for the syntactic generation of the Chinese passive sentences. What's more, the writer makes a theoretical hypothesis which is conformed to the generative grammar. By the comparative analysis, the following result can be gained:the computing process of Agree and Move both exist in the passive constructions of these two languages. They have the same Agree force:they both need to check the functional categories T and v; while the Move force is quite different:that in English is completely forced by the syntactic elements; while that in Chinese needs to combine the syntactic and the semantic elements together to give a full explanation. Also, there is one more process Merge in Chinese. By contrasting the passive structure in English and Chinese, the posterity will further understand the theories of VP shell and the Feature Checking Theory etc., after all, the theory can direct the actual practice, on the contrary, the practice can testify the reliability of the theory.The whole passage will be divided into five chapters.The first chapter is the general introduction. It mainly includes the definitions of the passive; the various forms of the passive in both English and Chinese; the studying approaches that will be used in in this thesis; the studying values and meanings.The second chapter will give a complete summary of the passive structures' studying condition both at home and abroad. At abroad, the writer will summarize from the perspective of structuralism, the transformational grammar of Chomsky and at last, the theoretical basis of this thesis is given more emphasis, at the same time, the related concepts are precisely described; while at home the writer will cut in by concluding which part of speech will the word "bei" be included, just like the Prepositional Theory, the Auxiliary etc. And also, the studying results of the generative grammar related with Chinese will be illustrated.The third chapter is the body part of the whole passage. It takes the syntactic analysis as the center and illustrates the similarities and the differences of this structure in both of the languages by means of contrasting. In this part, we take the method of analyzing and illustrating one by one but not take these two together because using this way, we will give a clear explanation of each passive phenomenon. In English, here we just talk about the two simple constructions while in Chinese, there are generally four forms of the passive pattern. In the last subpart, the concrete comparison will give us a quite clear demonstration of the differences and the similarities of the passive patterns in these two languages.The fourth chapter is the syntactic analysis of the implied passive structure. It is the tentative extension and development based on the studying result of the third chapter. Because the pure syntactic study of the explicit passive structures is quite limited and there is almost no study of the implied ones, this thesis brings forward the latter based on the former, hoping to put a way for the future learners. This chapter which includes three parts makes a separate study of the covert passives in English and Chinese and then takes these two together to make a comparison. Because there are many uncontrollable changing attributes and the focus is not here, the writer here will not give overmuch illustration and only makes a comparison where there is necessity.The fifth chapter is the conclusion. It will put forward the content and main points studied, the problems of the thesis and the contributions it will make for the future study.