The Generation And Expansion Of The Passive Concept And The Passive Sentence In English

The passive sentence in English is a common grammatical phenomenon and it originates from the passive event existent in the objective world. The passive event is the categorization of the related objective things and actions, and it refers to the event that the patient passively undergoes the action exerted by the agent. Then the passive event is conceptualized into the passive concept in the conceptual world through metaphorical mappings. As a result, the passive concept is generated. Its connotation is:The patient undergoes the passive action exerted by the agent, and it consists of three conceptual elements, namely the patient, the passion action and the agent. According to different attributes of the members in the category, the passive concept is divided into the prototypical one and the non-prototypical ones. The connotation of the prototypical passive concept is:The patient undergoes the concrete passive action exerted by the agent. The non-prototypical passive concepts include Non-prototype I and Non-prototype Ⅱ. The connotation of Non-prototype I is:The patient undergoes the abstract passive action exerted by the agent while that of Non-prototype Ⅱ is:The patient undergoes the passive resultant state exerted by the agent. The cognitive mechanism that the passive concept is expanded from the prototypical one to the non-prototypical ones is metaphorical mappings. The passive sentence in English is the linguistic representation in English of the passive concept and it is generated by the passive concept being mapped into English through metaphorical mappings. The syntactic structure of the passive sentence in English is:S+Be+V-en+(By the agent) and it also has the divisions of the prototype and the non-prototypes. The prototype of the passive sentence in English is the linguistic representation in English of that of the passive concept, and its syntactic structure is S+Be+V-en1+(By the agent) in which V-en1is the verb indicating the concrete passive action. The prototype of the passive sentence in English is the linguistic representation in English of those of the passive concept, and their syntactic structures are separately S+Be+V-en2+(By the agent) and S+Be+V-en3+(By the agent) where V-en2is the verb indicating the abstract passive action and V-en3is the verb indicating the passive resultant state. The syntactic form of the prototype of the passive sentence in English is identical with that of the non-prototypes, but they are different in other syntactic features because they reflect the passive concept with distinct characteristics.