A Contrastive Study Of The Passive Voice Of English, Chinese And Japanese

The passive voice structure, a very common yet complicated linguistic phenomenon, has never failed to arouse great interest of either linguists or common speakers.The character"(被)bei" was ranked as the Year Character of 2009 by the "Checkage of Chinese in 2009", the structure "bei..." becomes more and more popular. A great many grammarians and linguists have attempted to define it and explain its characteristics,constraints and usages, but these accounts are often different or even conflicting, which are sometimes more confusing and misleading than helpful.Therefore, to ensure proper understanding and use of English, Chinese and Japanese passive voice, it is important to make a comparison and contrast between them,and to find out their differences and similarities,but most of these having been made into this so far is fragmental and unsystematic. To date, a great many researches have been devoted into the comparison of passive voice of English and Chinese, but the comparative study of the passive constructions of English and Japanese is much less, let alone the contrastive study of the passive voice of the three languages.It is these two reasons that prompt the present study of English, Japanese and Chinese passives.But due to limited space and the complication of Chinese passive structure, this paper will deal mainly with passive sentences, and make a comparative study of English and Japanese passive sentences and Chinese marked passive structure.