| The passive voice is commonly used in scientific articles, government documents and news reports. The study on passive voice has a long history. However, traditional analysis, structural analysis and Chomsky's analysis only focus on the language itself and fail to illustrate the deeper reasons of the formation of passive voice from a cognitive perspective. In this paper, resorting to the theories founded by Lakoff, Langacker and Croft I try to probe into the passive voice and find out how it is formed on the basis of previous studies on this subject.Chapter I is literature review, a brief introduction of the studies of traditional grammar and other mainstream linguistic schools on the passive voice. And the defects of previous studies and their failure to explain the constraints of voice are also introduced in this chapter. Due to the inadequacy of previous studies on the passive voice and the constraints of voice, in Chapter II the cognitive definition of passive voice is introduced. Several theories are provided as relevant theories in this paper, i.e. Prototype Theory, Canonical Event Model and Causal Chain Mode. Then comes the analysis of the two main properties of the passive voice - affectedness and promotion of non-agent and demotion of agent. In Chapter III the passive voice is divided into prototypical member and non-prototypical member based on the Prototype Theory. In Chapter IV the constraints of voice are answered from a cognitive perspective, which proves the superiority of the analysis of the passive voice from a cognitive perspective compared with other theories. Chapter V concerns with the functions of English passives. Chapter VI is the conclusion of this paper. |
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