| With the development of economic globalization and cross-cultural communication, more and more people are being exposed to two or even more foreign languages. In China, many university students who major in English choose Japanese as their second foreign language, and students who major in Japanese invariably choose English as their second foreign language. It is known that passive voice is a perennial difficulty for many language learners, and the similarities and differences between English passive voice and Japanese passive voice pose great difficulties for those who are learning English and Japanese at the same time.Halliday holds that language performs three meta-functions, namely ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function. Transitivity system is a very important system to achieve ideational function. Choices among different process types can be made to realize the ideational function of representing the "inner" and "outer" experience of human being. Contrastive analysis of Chinese and a foreign language with functional grammar has made prosperous achievements in China, but contrastive analysis of two foreign languages with functional grammar made in China is rare. In this thesis, the author is going to make a tentative contrastive study on the differences and similarities between English and Japanese passive voice in editorials on the basis of functional grammar by Halliday.Vox Populi, Vox Dei, a very popular column in the well-known Japanese newspaper, Asahi Shimbun, proves to be very useful to the people who learn English and Japanese at the same time so 57 editorials are chosen from the column to satisfy the analytical need of the thesis. On the basis of transitivity system and voice system in functional grammar, four process types in which the passive clauses appear are identified then the frequency of the passive clauses in four process types in the 57 English editorials and corresponding 57 Japanese editorials is counted.The observed data is analyzed to conclude that in editorials there are some differences and similarities between the usage of English passive clauses and Japanese passive clauses in four process types. At the end of the thesis the differences and similarities are accounted for with restrictions on the usage of passive clauses in the two languages. In this thesis, transitivity system and restrictions on the usage of the passive clauses are combined, which may shed fresh light on the teaching and learning of English and Japanese passive voice. |
