A Construction-Based Contrastive Study Of Functions Of English And Chinese Passive Voices

Passive voice, as one of common and important grammatical phenomena, has long been a key research area for various linguists with different backgrounds. The comparative and contrastive study of passives in English and Chinese takes up a particular share in English-Chinese comparative linguistics. Generally speaking, the traditional grammarians focus on the distributions and characteristics of Be-passive in English and "Bei" sentence in Chinese. The formalism linguists, such as Chomsky, study the passive sentences from the perspective of pure structure, with a total ignorance of their pragmatic use and functions. On the other hand, functionalism linguists, such as Halliday, study the passive voice from the aspects of semeiology and sociology, on the assumption that meaning is function. More concretely, according to Halliday, functions are divided into three levels, namely, ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function. Unfortunately, the problems of distributions and structures remain to be solved in functional approach analysis. In a word, the previous researches are strong on structural analysis or partial function description but weak on unified classification and systemic function analysis of passive structures in English and Chinese.Undoubtedly, the occurrence of Construction Grammar (CG) Theory provides a rather reasonable and plausible perspective to the above problems in study of passive voice. According to Goldberg (2005), a construction can be defined as any pair of form and function, with unpredictable specific meaning in context of use. In addition, the Construction Grammarians hold that constructions own the characteristics of hierarchy and taxonomy in language system. It seems that the problems of passive voice can be solved to some extent within the framework of CG. And in this study, a systemic and comprehensive analysis of passive voice functions is compared and contrasted from the perspectives of semantic, pragmatic and textual functions. We argue that the Be construction and Bei construction share several commonalities in semantic functions and textual functions, but differs a lot in pragmatic functions, which are proved to be true in the ongoing analysis and discussion. Concretely speaking, passive constructions in English and Chinese share the common semantic functions of indicating syntactic relationship, emphasizing sentence constituents, adjusting sentence structure and textual functions of maintaining cohesion in form, keeping coherence in meaning. Whereas, they exert different pragmatic functions of expressing objectivity, being polite and so on in English and showing personal feeling in Chinese in addition to their commonalities.However, due to the theoretical imperfection and the complexity of passive constructions, there are some inevitable limitations in this thesis, which, on the other hand, provide the more detailed directions and areas for future research.