A Functional Approach To Agentful Passive Construction In English

Verschueren (1999) views pragmatics as a general functional perspective on (any aspect of) language and proposes the Theory of Linguistic Adaptation, a brand-new perspective from which pragmatics can be understood and illustrated. The use of language is actually, according to Verschueren's Theory of Linguistic Adaptation, the process of making linguistic choices and these choices can be situated at any level of linguistic form. The passive construction, a typical syntactic topic, is among the choices and can undoubtedly be investigated under the guidance of the Theory of Linguistic Adaptation. Therefore, this dissertation has made a survey of the textual-pragmatic functions of the agentful passive construction, taking Verschueren's Theory of Linguistic Adaptation as the theoretical basis. It has not only proved that the Theory of Linguistic Adaptation, brand-new as it is, is workable in the analysis of the functions of the agentful passive construction, but it has also presented a rather integral set of textual-pragmatic functions of the agentful passive construction from the functional perspective.This dissertation is made up of six chapters. The main content of each chapter is as follows.Chapter One briefly introduces the reasons for the topic selection, the theoretical basis, the research method and the sources of the data. The research method employed in this paper is qualitative method. The linguistic data are from two sources: Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1946) and English Reader (泛读教程) edited by Shen Li, Zhu Peihao, et al. (申立,诸沛浩主编, 1995).Chapter Two presents an overview of the previous studies on the passive construction and the functions of this construction, and restates what this dissertation will focus on.Chapter Three is devoted to a thorough investigation and explanation of the Theory of Linguistic Adaptation and hence the theoretical framework of the present study.