A Cross-linguistic Study Of Passive Constructions With Its Implication On The Study Of Chinese Bei Construction

The passive is a universal construction (Siewierska1986). If we take across-linguistic view, we would find that this construction has a variety of syntacticrepresentations. It differs from the active in such aspects as syntactic structure,themantic roles, morphological representation of verbs, etc. Having observed passiveconstructions in a multiple of languages, I come to a conclusion that the syntacticfeatures of universal significance are the demotion of the external argument and themarking of the verb. Other features such as insertion of auxiliary verbs. are languagespecific. With this in mind, I have been trying to analyse the Chinese Bei Constructionunder this perspective, which I believe will shed new light on the much-discussedpassive construction in Chinese.I argue that the passive marker "Bei" in Chinese takes two differentpart-of-speeches: One is preposition, the other is adverb. The prepositonal Bei isengineered in the so-called long passives to introduce the semantic role of agentwhich demoted from the Specifier (external argument) position to a non-argumentadjunct position in the preposition phrase. In short passive this demoted argument ofagent is implied (i.e. withoug surface coding). The ellipsis of this syntactic contentleaves no choice but to the knowledge that Bei in the short passive is an adverb.Actually, the short passive in Chinese is one of the topic construction. As atopic-dominant language (Xu Liejiong&Liu Danqing1998), Chinese distinguishesitself in the structural similarity of the passive construction and the topic construction,the reanalysis of which promoted the usage of adverb Bei.