The Study Of The Unmarked Passive Sentence In Common Chinese And Its Function

In Mandarin Chinese, the unmarked passive sentence has greatly exceeded the marked passive sentence in number. However, in academic circles, research on the unmarked passive sentence still remains on superficial level. This paper first reviews the previous research on functions of the passive sentence. It is known that traditional grammar and structural grammar have contributed much to the passive sentence research, however they've failed to produce a scientific device for the passive sentence research, and also have neglected the study of the unmarked passive sentence, owing to their separation of syntactic analysis. Based on the reciprocity between form and meaning, the paper classifies the unmarked passive sentence into five categories syntactically, and analyses their basic structures and functions respectively. Subjects of the unmarked passive sentence featuring definitiveness, can act as Topic of sentences in terms of semantic function and thus become objects of illustration, comment and description. Recipients acting as subjects can result in the semantic conversion of predicate and also require transitive verbs (or phrasal verbs). Whereas predicate, acting as Comment, are the carrier of new information, semantic focus of the sentence, and also serve as the illustration, comment and description of subject. The paper further classifies the unmarked passive sentence as the declarative sentence, the descriptive sentence and the evaluating sentence, from the perspective of semantic function, and discusses their semantic features and semantic constraints that different elements of sentences have on sentence functions. Finally, the paper explores various modes and means of solving the problem of the identification of semantic focus of the unmarked passive sentence with both adverbials and complements.