| Passive voice is one of the most important sentence patterns in English,and is the main syntactic form in technical English and academic writing.As English used more and more in writing,and the increase of Chinese English Learners’ participation in international academic activities,it is more necessary to study the use of passive voice in writing by Chinese English learners.On the basis of domestic and foreign literature,this study demonstrates the definition and Quirk’s classifications of passive voice.Passive voice can be categorized into the following three classifications,central passive voice,semi-passive voice,and pseudo-passive voice according to the gradient.In view of this classification,the distribution of passive voice,the main passive components,and the voice misuse;three aspects of passive voice in the writing of Chinese English learners have been studied.Data for the current study comes from WECCL(Written English corpus of Chinese Learners)and the Corpus of Contemporary American English(COCA).This study aims to discuss the following three questions: 1.What are the differences of the distribution and use of passive voice in writings of Chinese English learners in contrast with native English speakers? 2.What are the differences of the features in major passive voice constituents in writings of Chinese English learners in contrast with native English speakers? 3.What are the passive voice misuses and the causes in writings of Chinese English learners?The results of the study are as follows.First,in the two corpora,the distribution and use of different types of passive voice are different.Areas,where significant differences have also been found,include central passive voice,semi-passive voice,and pseudo-passive voice;the second major finding is that in the passive constituents,more than half of the high-frequencies of past participles in WECCL overlap with them in COCA.The preposition “to” is the most used of the two registers,followed by “by”.There has been a slight overuse of the preposition “by” for Chinese English learners.In addition,postpositional prepositional components are mostly gerunds.Regarding the noun phrases after "by",these expressions in WECCL always arise unnecessary subjectivity compared to COCA.There are three voice misuses in WECCL which are past participle misuse,voice selection misuse,and preposition misuse.The investigation of this study has shown that these causes of voice misuses are mainly the differences between Chinese and English,negative transfer,and learners’ cognitive abilities. |
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