A Corpus-based Study On Passive Voice In News English

In the light of various types of passive voice, this thesis focuses on the distributions and the information foci of passive voice in news English on account of the statistics from corpus. Through the analysis of the statistics, the factors which influence the uses of passive voice in news English are evident. According to the findings, the practical function of passive voice in the process of translating and news writing is put forward.This thesis mainly counts and analyzes the prepositions and the following nouns and verbs which are commonly used in long passive in news English by means of BYU, SPSS 21.0 and Microsoft Excel. In accordance with the statistics obtained by the mentioned methodologies, the distributions, the information foci and the causes of different types of passive voice are stated. The respective findings are:long passive has a higher using frequency compared with short passive. In terms of the information foci, the information focus of short passive is the verb while that of long passive is the noun which follows the preposition. Consequently, the uses of passive voice in news English are on the ground of the style of news writing and the theory of end focus.In avoidance of deficiencies and flaws of previous researches, this paper adopts more objective research methodologies and more specific object of study. It has significant meaning in both theoretical and practical use.