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Passive constructions in English and Chinese: a corpus-based study

Passive constructions in English and Chinese: a corpus-based study. Tony McEnery Richard Xiao. Aims and objectives. Using comparable corpus data to explore passives in written and spoken English to explore passives in written and spoken Chinese to contrast passives in the two languages.

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Passive constructions in English and Chinese: a corpus-based study

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  1. Passive constructions in English and Chinese: a corpus-based study Tony McEnery Richard Xiao CL 2005, Birmingham

  2. Aims and objectives • Using comparable corpus data • to explore passives in written and spoken English • to explore passives in written and spoken Chinese • to contrast passives in the two languages CL 2005, Birmingham

  3. Corpora • English • FLOB: ca. one million words, written British English, 500 samples, 15 text categories, 1991-1992 • BNCdemo: ca. four million words, the demographically sampled component of the BNC (conversational data) • Chinese • LCMC: ca. one million words, written Mandarin Chinese, 500 samples, 15 text categories, 1991-1992 • http://www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/corplang/lcmc • LDC CallHome Mandarin: ca. 300,000 words, telephone conversations, 120 transcripts of 5-10-minute continuous telephone conversations CL 2005, Birmingham

  4. Text categories covered FLOB/LCMC CL 2005, Birmingham

  5. Passives in English (1) • Be vs. get-passives • Be-passives occur in both dynamic and stative situations • Get-passives occur only in dynamic situations • Go and get/*be changed! • Only be-passives are appropriate in infinitival complements • they liked to be/*get seen to go to church • Be-passives are predominantly more frequent than get-passives • 955 vs. 31 instances per 100K words in FLOB/BNCdemo • Be-passives are more frequent in writing while get-passives are more frequent in spoken data • Normalised frequencies (per 100K words) • Be-passives: 854 in FLOB and 101 in BNCdemo • Get-passives: 5 in FLOB and 26 in BNCdemo CL 2005, Birmingham

  6. Passives in English (2) • Long vs. short passives (1) • For both be and get-passives, short forms are much more frequent than long forms in written as well as spoken data • Short passives are significantly more common in spoken than written English • LL=209.225 for 1 df, p<0.001 CL 2005, Birmingham

  7. Passives in English (3) • Long vs. short passives (2) • Get-passives are more likely than be-passives to occur without an agent • LL=76.015 for 1 df, p<0.001 • The agents in get-passives are typically impersonal (e.g. got caught by the police) or even inanimate (e.g. got knocked down by a car) • When personal agents appear, they are typically informationally dense and thus semantically indispensable • e.g. The bleeding fat girl, he got asked out by her. CL 2005, Birmingham

  8. Passives in English (4) • Adverbials in be and get-passives • Adverbials are more frequent in be than get-passives • 17.7% for be-passives and 7% for get-passives • Types of adverbials are less varied in get than be-passives • Typically they ‘have an intensifying or focusing role’ in get-passives (Carter and McCarthy 1999: 53) • Proportions of be-passives with an adverbial are similar in writing and speech • 17.3% vs. 19.5% in FLOB and BNCdemo • Proportion of get-passives with an adverbial is greater in writing than in speech • 15.2% vs. 6.6% in FLOB and BNCdemo CL 2005, Birmingham

  9. Passives in English (5) • Semantic and pragmatic properties (1) • Get-passives are frequently used to indicate speaker attitude towards the events described (typically a negative evaluation) while be-passives do not appear to be used in this way CL 2005, Birmingham

  10. Passives in English (7) • Semantic and pragmatic properties (2) • Collocations (L0-R1, z score>3.0, frequency>3) of get-passives are more likely to show an inflictive meaning than be-passives • Get-passive: 46.5% (BNCdemo) and (married in FLOB); be-passive: 27% (BNCdemo) and 8% (FLOB) • However, get-passives are NOT necessarily more frequently negative in spoken English • Negative instances: FLOB: 45.8%; BNCdemo: 37.3% • Exceptionally high co-occurrence frequency of a few neutral verbs, e.g. married, paid, dressed, changed CL 2005, Birmingham

  11. Passives in English (8) • Semantic and pragmatic properties (3) • Collocations reveal that get-passives are more informal in style than be-passives • The get-passive is more restricted in collocations and is likely to co-occur with verbs referring to daily activities and informal expressions (based on BNCdemo) • GET - dressed, changed, get weighed, fed (i.e. eat), washed, cleaned • GET - pricked, hooked, mixed (up), carried (away), muddled (up), sacked, get kicked (out), stuffed, thrown (out), chucked, pissed, nicked • These verbs are rarely found among the top 100 collocations for the be-passive in BNCdemo CL 2005, Birmingham

  12. Passives in English (9) • Variations across text categories • Be-passives are over 8 times as frequent in FLOB as in BNCdemo • Text categories A-J typically show higher proportions of be- passives than K-R • In written genres, official documents (H) and academic prose (J) show exceptionally high proportions of be-passives • Biber’s (1988) MDA: be-passives (long and short) positively weighted on D5 (abstract vs. non-abstract information) • Get passives typically occur in colloquial and informal genres • Get-passives are over 5 times as frequent in BNCdemo as in FLOB • In writing, skills/trades/hobbies (E) and humour (R) show exceptionally high proportions of get-passives CL 2005, Birmingham

  13. Passives in English (10) • Syntactic functions • Finite vs. non-finite positions • Finite: predicate • Non-finite: adjectival, adverbial, complement, object, subject • English passives are by far the most frequent in the predicate position • 97% for be-passives and 96% for get-passives • Non-finite forms • relatively common in object and complement positions • Rare in the subject position • The distribution of get-passives across syntactic functions is more balanced than that of be-passives CL 2005, Birmingham

  14. Passives in Chinese (1) • Syntactic vs. lexical passives • Syntactic passives • bei: most frequent and ‘universal’ passive marker • gei, jiao, rang: not fully grammaticalised, colloquial and dialectal • Wei(-agent-)suo: archaic and typically found in formal written genres • Lexical passives: ai, shou, zao • Lexical meanings are inherently passive CL 2005, Birmingham

  15. Passives in Chinese (2) • Long vs. short passives • Bei and gei are found in both long (40%, 43%) and short (60%, 57%) passives • Wei(-agent-)suo, jiao and rang only occur in long passives • Shou and zao are more frequent in short (68%, 63%) than long (32%, 37%) passives • Ai typically occurs in short passives (97%) • In lexical passives, the agent NPs can be systematically interpreted as attributive modifiers of nominalised verbs, but they cannot in syntactic passives • Long passives tend to be used in speech and colloquial genres while short passives are found in typical written genres such as academic prose (J), official documents (H) and biographies (G) CL 2005, Birmingham

  16. Passives in Chinese (3) • Syntactic functions • Most frequent in the predicate position • 76% for syntactic passives (bei 74%); 75% for lexical passives • Non-predicate positions: attributive, adverbial, nominal, object, subject • The attributive use is the second most important syntactic function (14%) • Rare in the subject position • Not found as a complement CL 2005, Birmingham

  17. Passives in Chinese (4) • Interaction between passives and aspect • Chinese passives are closely allied with aspect • syntactic passives convey an aspectual meaning of result • Bare passives account for the largest proportions for syntactic (40%) and lexical (78%) passives • Perfective -le is frequent in both syntactic (17%) and lexical (11%) passives • RVCs and resultative de-structure are more common in syntactic passives while bare forms are more frequent in lexical passives • Bare verbs are uncommon in syntactic passives, especially when the passive constructions function as predicates CL 2005, Birmingham

  18. Passives in Chinese (5) • Semantic properties • Chinese passives are “usually of unfavourable meanings” (Chao 1968: 703) • Prototypical passive marker bei derived from its main verb usage, meaning ‘suffer’ (Wang 1957) • However, under the influence of Western languages, passives are no longer restricted to verbs with an inflictive meaning in Chinese • Proportions of negative semantic prosodies • Syntactic: gei (68%), rang (67%), bei (52%), jiao (50%), wei…suo (19%) • Lexical: ai (100%), zao (100%), shou (65%) • Collocations of bei-passives • 51% negative, 39% neutral, 10% positive CL 2005, Birmingham

  19. Passives in Chinese (6) • Variations across text categories • Passives are 11 times as frequent in writing than in speech • In writing, passives are most frequent in religious texts (D) and mystery/detective stories (L), but least common in news editorials (C) and official documents (H) • Unlike English, Chinese passives are rare in official documents (H) and academic prose (J) • Be-passives function to mark objectivity and a formal style but Chinese passives do not have this function • Bei-passives • The contrast in proportions between long and short forms is typically less marked in 5 types of fiction, humour and speech • More frequently negative in news editorials (C), mystery/detective stories (L) and adventure stories (N); predominantly negative in speech; but rarely negative in official documents (H) and academic prose (J) CL 2005, Birmingham

  20. Contrast (1): Frequencies • Passives are nearly 10 times as frequent in English as in Chinese • Be-passives can be used for both stative and dynamic situations whereas Chinese passives can only occur in dynamic events • Chinese passives typically have a negative semantic prosody while English passives (especially be-passives) do not • English has a tendency to overuse passives, especially in formal writing (Quirk 1968; Baker 1985) whereas Chinese tends to avoid syntactic passives wherever possible () CL 2005, Birmingham

  21. Contrast (2): Long vs. short forms • The agent NP in the long passive follows the passivised verb in English but precedes it in Chinese • Short passives are predominant in English while long passives are much more common in Chinese • Passives are used in English to avoid mentioning the agent • The agent must normally be spelt out in Chinese passives • But this constraint has become more relaxed nowadays • When it is difficult to spell out the agent • Passives are used in English • A vague expression such as ren ‘someone’ and renmen ‘people’ is often specified instead of using passives in Chinese CL 2005, Birmingham

  22. Contrast (3): Semantic properties • Chinese passives are more frequently used with an inflictive meaning than English passives • Chinese passives were used at early stages primarily for unpleasant or undesirable events; but the semantic constraint on the use of passives has become more relaxed, especially in writing • In this respect, the get-passive is closer to Chinese passives than the unmarked be-passive, which is more stylistically oriented • Proportions of meaning categories • English: neutral > negative > positive • Chinese: negative > neutral > positive CL 2005, Birmingham

  23. Contrast (4): Syntactic functions • As a verb construction, the passive is most frequently used in the predicate position in both English and Chinese • The proportion of passives used as predicates in English (over 95%) is much higher than that in Chinese (76% on average) • Passives are more frequent in the object than subject position in both languages • Passives often function as attributive modifiers in Chinese but as complements in English • Passives in Chinese (bei-passives in particular) are more balanced across syntactic functions than English passives • Chinese passives in the predicate position typically interact with aspect but in English the interaction between passives and aspect is not obvious CL 2005, Birmingham

  24. Contrast (5): Genre variations • Be-passives occur more frequently in informative than imaginative text categories while get-passives are most commonly found in colloquial genres and informal written genres • Official documents (H) and academic prose (J) show very high proportions of passives in English, but have the lowest proportions of passives in Chinese • In Chinese, wei…suo typically occurs in formal written genres and jiao, rang and gei in colloquial genres • Mystery/detective stories (L) and religious writing (D) show exceptionally high proportions of passives in Chinese • Mystery/detective stories are often concerned with victims who suffer from various kinds of mishaps or what criminals do to them • In religions, human beings are passive animals whose fate is controlled by some kind of supernatural force • The difference in the overall distribution of passives is closely associated with the different functions of passives in the two languages • (be-passives) marking an impersonal, objective and formal style in English • an ‘inflictive voice’ in Chinese CL 2005, Birmingham

  25. Conclusions • Passive constructions express a basic passive meaning in English and Chinese, but they also show a range of differences • These differences are associated with their different functions in the two languages • Comparable monolingual corpora provide a useful tool for contrastive linguistics CL 2005, Birmingham

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