Passive constructions in English and Chinese: a corpusbased study

1
Passive constructions in English and Chinese a
corpus-based study

• Tony McEnery
• Richard Xiao

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

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

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Text categories covered FLOB/LCMC
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

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
• LL209.225 for 1 df, plt0.001

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Passives in English (3)

• Long vs. short passives (2)
• Get-passives are more likely than be-passives to
  occur without an agent
• LL76.015 for 1 df, plt0.001
• 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.

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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

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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

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Passives in English (7)

• Semantic and pragmatic properties (2)
• Collocations (L0-R1, z scoregt3.0, frequencygt3) 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

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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

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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
• Bibers (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

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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

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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

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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)

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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

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

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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), weisuo (19)
• Lexical ai (100), zao (100), shou (65)
• Collocations of bei-passives
• 51 negative, 39 neutral, 10 positive

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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)

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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 ()

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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

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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 gt negative gt positive
• Chinese negative gt neutral gt positive

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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

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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, weisuo 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

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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