The Contrastive Rhetoric Approach To Analyzing The Passive Voice Deficiency In Chinese College Students' English Compositions

Based on the existing data by other researches and the analyzed result of the collected college students'English compositions, this paper finds that Chinese college students have the same difficulties and similar troubles in the acquisition of the passive voice, among which the passive voice deficiency is one of the most common phenomenon in their compositions. In view of this situation, this paper attempts to use the approaches of contrastive rhetoric theory and the recently developed cultural rhetoric, and tries to reveal the reasons of passive voice deficiency.This paper holds that the reasons of the passive voice deficiency can be obtained in two aspects:product cause and producer cause. Product refers to the texts or specifically, the sentences that are written by Chinese college students; producer, on the other hand, means the writers who write these texts, namely the Chinese students. The former uses the approach of contrastive rhetoric to analyze the reasons, and the latter takes cultural contrastive rhetoric as its theory foundation.The product cause of the passive voice deficiency is discussed in the following two factors:Firstly, different sentence patterns are used in different languages. According to Kirkpatrick, English is to some extent a right-branching language, which means the important or new information comes at the beginning of a sentence. Whereas, Chinese is a left-branching language, which means the unimportant or old information comes in front, while the new information comes in the back. In this case, the Chinese sentence pattern conflicts with the highlithing function of passive voice, which brings obstacles to Chinese college students'acquisition of passive voice.Secondly, the writer or reader-responsibility, as one of the rhetoric methods, also can affect the using frequency of the passive voice. English is researched to be a language of writer's responsibility. Thus, when the recipient of an event or a movement is more important than the agent, the English writers often use the passive voice to convey the information directly to the readers and therefore to fulfill the writer's responsibility. However, reader-responsibility plays an important role in Chinese writing. Hence, even when the recipient is the focal point, and the passive voice should be used, the recipient is still unconsciously hidden or delay-introduced in Chinese writings. It is believed that the readers have the responsibility to find out the real important information by themselves.The producer cause is developed from the cultural contrastive rhetoric. It mainly focuses on the producer's social value and thinking model as the causes of passive voice deficiency.Firstly, in the aspect of social value, whether one believes in collectivism or individualism would affect his or her ways in expression of personal opinion. As mentioned in the product causes analysis, in China, people prefer active voice to passive voice. Besides, "the gun shoots the bird which takes the lead" is one of the deep-rooted concepts in collectivism. Such social collectivism limits the individual's expression, so that people in this society more often use active voice rather than passive voice by following suit. On the other hand, westerners are individualists, so their way of expression is not so much influenced by other members in the community. Rather, the westerners may use a passive voice unexpectedly to show their own personality.Secondly, in terms of thinking models, Fu Lei said, Chinese people emphasize on synthesis, insinuation, and connotation; whereas the westerns focus on analysis of the subtle and intricate part. According to what Fu said, the westerners hold nature as the object of cognition and exploration, so their thinking is in analytical model. However, the Chinese is in integrative thinking model. Thus, in the western thought, objects can not have the active consciousness or action as human beings, whereas in Chinese, objects can also be subjects, the two are interchangeable. This paper considers that the difference in thinking model is the essential reason of the passive voice deficiency.Therefore, this paper draw a conclusion:only when the students stay conscious to the thinking differences behind the differences in syntax structure, rhetoric method, can they overcome the obstacles of passive voice deficiency, thus fundamentally improve their English writing and communication levels.