A Comparative Study Of Passive Structure Based On The Degree Of Realization Of Topicalization In English And Chinese

As one of the most common sentence structures,passive structure appeals special attention of Chinese and foreign researchers.And contrastive study of English and Chinese passive constructions also becomes a hot topic recently.While in terms of syntactic study of this topic,some arguments still exist in linguistic field,and these arguments include generation process,syntactic features and even definition of English and Chinese passive constructions.In this thesis,we hold the view that those arguments are resulted from over application of Indo-European grammar system to other languages which don't belong to Indo-European language family.Therefore,a study of Chinese and English passive constructions based on the topicalization degree of respective language will be given in this thesis.A brief introduction of both English and Chinese passive constructions is stated first,and on the foundation of the book,Topic:Structural and Functional Analysis,the main features of topic structure are elaborated.With some important previous studies introduced and compared and in the process of participating bilingual teaching,the joint point of topic and passive construction is found,that is:English is a subject-prominent language,with little topic property reflected on English passive construction.On the contrary,on the basis of which Chinese is typical topic-prominent language,Chinese passive construction exerts obvious topic-prominent features.Especially,unmarked Chinese passive structure has totally the same syntactic properties with topic structure.Based on these points,this thesis analyzes each marked and unmarked English and Chinese passive structure respectively according to their different degrees of topicalization.If learners can't have a deep understanding of distinctions between English and Chinese passive constructions,a lot of acquisition errors will be produced.Based on the findings of this thesis,the author analyzes reasons of causing these acquisition errors and provides suggestions for declining these errors...