Passive Constructions In English And Chinese: From The Perspective Of CA And CIA

As one of the key structures in almost all languages, passive construction has appealed a lot to researchers worldwide. In the past several decades, passives in both English and Chinese have been subject to much research, both corpus-based and non-corpus-based. A number of contrastive studies of passive constructions in the two languages have also been published. However, most of them did not use corpus data but were based on a handful of examples common to nearly all of these papers. Only some has provided a relatively systematic contrastive study of English and Chinese passives by combining the corpus-based and contrastive approaches.This thesis takes a combined CA and CIA approach to the analysis of English and Chinese passive constructions. According to the Integrated Contrastive Model proposed by Sylviane Granger, contrastive analysis data helps to formulate predictions about interlanguage which can be checked against contrastive interlanguage analysis data. This study highlights the value of such a combined approach. The language data used in the study are extracts from Weicheng and Pride and Prejudice and their respective translations by famous translators and also some randomly chosen essays from SACST (Sino-American Compositions of Shared Topics). SPSS 16.0 is employed in the analysis of the statistical data in the study.A brief introduction of both English and Chinese passive constructions is given first, with some important previous studies introduced and compared later. A contrastive study of English and Chinese passive constructions is then presented based on the previous studies, focusing on the issues such as the overall frequencies, syntactic differences, semantic and pragmatic properties. Meanwhile, correspondences and divergences concerning the mutual translation of English and Chinese passive constructions are also examined with great care. After that, three hypotheses are formulated regarding the features of passives in Chinese EFL learners. Findings from the contrastive interlanguage analysis turn out to be partly supportive of the predictions made based on CA. It is found that Chinese EFL learners tend to overuse passive constructions in their interlanguage production, especially the long passives. Besides, there seems to be a blurring in their use of English be passives and get passives. All these features can be accounted for by the phenomena of inter-lingual transfer, intra-lingual transfer and transfer of training, which are further explained by the relations between linguistic universality and language specificity. Methodologically, this study demonstrates that comparable bilingual corpora and learner corpora can be exploited fruitfully in contrastive studies.