A Comparative Study of Passives in English and Chinese

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to discuss the concept of language universals and diversity, by comparing the differences between Chinese and English passive sentences. Based on the observation of the passive patterns in languages, it is found that there are many variations in the passive voice not only in the syntactic but in the semantic aspects. This thesis is to show that the Chinese passive construction has its own unique charm, but it can also be accounted for in the frame of language universals. Chinese syntax has been greatly influenced by Huang's (1982, 1999, 2007) authoritative works which have got a lot of recognition. This thesis, however, will point out that his analysis of the Chinese passives has a critical problem in that the passive subject still occupies the subject position of the clause. Given that the generalized characteristics of the passive construction requires the passive subject to be demoted somehow, either in the oblique phrase or in the deleted fashion, the canonical subject position for the passive subject in Chinese cannot be maintained. As an alternative, this thesis provides an analysis in which the lower clause in Huang et al. (2007) is contained inside the DP complement, the head of which is null in the sense of Dubinsky and Davies (2003). The active subject remains inside the complex DP complement, such that the analysis of Chinese represents the so-called subject demotion in the passives. Given the data from many different languages, we have noticed that the structure of passives is rarely possible to reach a unified analysis to account for all possible languages. For Chinese passives, there are many dialects in China and it is very difficult to get a consensus on the judgement of grammaticality. Nevertheless, the thesis will explore the passive sentence with 'bei' morpheme and examine the previous analyses, particularly focusing on the NP-Movement, VP complementation, A-movement, and predication. It will also discuss the special relationship between the short passives and the long passives with respect to the agent deletion. Eventually, this thesis is similar to Huang et al. (2007) in that the 'bei' in the passive constructions is treated as a verb, but different from, them by assuming that the lower clause is embedded inside the DP complex, which prevents the role of the active subject from maintaining its agent thematic role in the sentence.