A Corpus-based Study Of Passive Voice In Academic Writing By Chinese MA English Candidates

Passive voice is a crucial grammatical item in English.Its use is a major feature of academic writing as well as an indicator of the quality of MA English papers.With more and more use of English in international academic exchange and more engagement of Chinese MA English candidates in academic activities,it becomes more necessary to examine the use of passive voice of Chinese MA English candidates in academic writing.This paper examines the use of passive voice in Chinese Academic Written English(CAWE),a corpus built of samples of academic writing by Chinese MA English candidates,from three aspects:distribution of passives,major passive constituents and voice misuses.British Academic Written English(BAWE)is used as reference.The findings are as follows:Firstly,distributions and uses of passive voice in the two corpora are different among different categories of passive voice.In comparison with BAWE,CAWE shows no significant difference in distributions of both BE-passive and GET-passive,while there is significant differences in distributions of long passives and short passives as well as distributions of central passives,semi-passives and pseudo-passives;Secondly,as for passive constituents,over half of high-frequency past participles in CAWE overlap with those in BAWE.In short passives specifically,except be used,their frequencies in CAWE are lower than those in BAWE,while in long passives their frequencies in CAWE are higher than those in BAWE.As for prepositions after past participles,the preposition by is most frequently applied in the two corpora,which is followed by in.In addition,most of post-preposition elements are noun phrases.Concerning noun phrases after by and in,compared with BAWE,nouns after by in CAWE always produce unnecessary subjectivity,nouns after in contain more specific and informative names for the components of writing.With regard to voice misuses in CAWE,they mainly belong to three categories:misuse of past participles,wrong selection of voice and misuse of preposition.Causes of misuses maybe the difference between Chinese and English,negative transfer and learners' cognition ability,etc.