A Cognitive Study Of English And Japanese Passive Constructions

Passive construction is a language phenomenon that a number of linguists at home andabroad have paid much attention to and have been interested in, because it has a particularsentence pattern and expresses the passive meaning relative to active meaning. Differentlinguists have done a lot of research on it from different perspectives. Traditionalgrammarians have studied its structure and meaning; structuralism tends to give detaileddescription; the generative school analyzes its formation by means of the ready-madegenerative grammar; and functionalists study it from the angle of information and pragmatics.While all of them make an important contribution to its study, they don’t go deeply into thecognitive motivation for its formation, which is unsatisfactory. This paper makes an attempt toapply Construction Grammar theory and Prototype Theory to analyzing English passiveconstruction (EPC) and Japanese passive construction (JPC), aiming at exploring theiressential characteristics, cognitive motivation and the similarities and differences betweenthem.For years, many linguists have made a lot of research on the passive construction andgiven different definitions and illustrations, but no agreement has been reached so far andtheir conclusions aren’t completely satisfactory. One important reason is possibly that theinternal structure of the passive construction as a grammatical category is not homogeneousand that its members behave in a different way.If we apply Construction Grammar and Prototype Theory to illustrating such a case, theanswer would be relatively satisfactory. Goldberg’ Construction Grammar thinks thatconstruction is the basic unit of language, i.e. the form-meaning pairing. Once a constructionis formed, it will own its independent structure and meaning, which confines the words thatenter into it and makes them generate non-original meanings. As an integer, a construction isgreater than the sum of its components and has its syntactic and semantic features independent of its components, and its meaning is not compositionally derived from itscomponents or other existing constructions. Meanwhile, Construction Grammar believesconstruction also conducts prototype effects. It consists of central members which occupy acentral position and marginal members which are situated in the edge location. Differentmembers should behave differently.Passive construction as a category is one kind of basic grammatical category by meansof which the passive concept in human thought is embodied in language. In spite of belongingto two different language systems, EPC and JPC almost have the same construction meaningthat the patient argument suffers influence caused by the predicate verb’s action. However,these two constructions express the passive meaning in a different way. In terms ofConstruction Grammar and Prototype Theory, EPC and JPC consist of typical members andatypical members respectively, which constitute two different continuums in which passivemeaning gradually decreases. This fully conforms to the characteristic of a cognitive category.This paper attempts to apply Construction Grammar and Prototype Theory as its guidingframework. It first analyzes the construction meaning of EPC and JPC. Then, it analyses andcompares EPC and JPC in terms of their syntactic and semantic properties and pragmaticfunctions. Next, it turns to prototype theory to do a comparative analysis of their idealizedmodels and prototype effects, their continuums and non-complete-correspondence. Thus, theresearch can dig out their similarities and differences, the formation reason and complicatedmechanism concealed in the passive construction. It is expected that this research will deepenour understanding of English and Japanese and make a certain contribution to foreignlanguage teaching, second language acquisition, translation concerning English and Japaneseand the study of other special constructions, theoretically and practically.