Agent-prominent In Chinese Passive And Its Typological Significance

In this article, we firstly discuss some sorts of passive markers in Chinese. They are " bei", the most important one in modern Chinese, three markers in ancient Chinese and those in dialects respectively. Based on the discussion, we come to the idea that passive sentences take agent-prominent as its typological characteristics. Human’s languages can be divided as, in terms of the degree of agent prominence, agent-forbidden, agent-allowed, agent-salient and agent-obligatory, which can be generally grouped as agent-concealed and agent-prominent. Chinese is the representative of agent-prominent languages, which use adposition as passive markers in majority, and have topic structure. The characteristics of Chinese as an agent-prominent language may be resulted in the effect of Chinese mighty topic. Passive is the production of a pragamatic function of " agent-backgrounding", which has other grammatical codes in different languages. Besides the introduction and epilogue, this article compose of six parts.Chapter1discusses the name and meaning of passive. We define passive as a syntax-distinguishable construction expressing passive meaning, excluding the notional passive sentences, while including those in ergative system.Chapter2concerns " bei" with the combinative study of diachrony and synchrony. In morden Chinese," bei" is mainly used as a preposition and auxiliary, in which, however, the former one is the foundation that made it used as a passive marker steadily.Chapter3firstly describes three passive markers in ancient Chinese. For those who are agent-prominent, they are used for a long time and have quite high frequency in a certain period; but neither those who are agent-forbidden nor those whose agent is not prominent enough can survive long. Then we breifly discuss passive markers in modern Chinese dialects. In many dialects, agent in passive can not be omitted, which is a strong evidence that Chinese passive is agent-prominent.Chapter4concerns the reason of agent-prominent in Chinese. We consider the mighty topic construction as a main reason.Chapter5concerns the typological classification of human languages based on the degree of agent promience toghter with some examples of languages of these types. Then we conclude the characteristics of agent-prominent languages:using adposition as passive marker and topic-prominent.Chapter6studies the core pragamatic function of passive:agent-backgrounding. This function would degrade subject as a syntax performance. There are some other way to represent the same function in syntax, including topic construction, foucus construction, subject-deleting and pronominalization of subject. All these ways have complex relation with passive, which is urged by one pragamatic function.We attach importance of the study of typology, including language-cross, dialect-cross and time-across study. We aim at exploring the typological difference of passive in human languages and the characteristics of passive in Chinese. The degree of agent promience can be a typological parameter in the study of passive, especially in terms of typology. That Chinese passvie was affected by topic construction proves once more the might of Chinese topic construction. Knowing the core pragmatic function of passive can answer the question of the scarcity of passive construction in many languages.