A Comparative Study On Passive Sentences In Scientific English And Chinese

The specific sentence structures and the specific passive meaning of passive sentence meet the characteristics of scientific style, such as accuracy, objectivity, formality, logic and the like, so passive sentence is very welcomed in both scientific English and Chinese. In terms of the scopes of previous studies, many scholars have made comparative studies of the similarities and differences between English and Chinese passive sentences from a macro and overall range. While comparative studies of English and Chinese passive sentences which are in the scope of scientific style are less seen; And in terms of the research methods, methods adopted in most of the previous studies mainly include documentation method and theory research method, while corpus-based approach is less adopted.In view of these, this paper has made a comparative study of passive sentences in scientific English and Chinese based on the Chinese-English Bilingual Corpus of Center for Chinese Linguistics PKU (CCL). This comparative study will help learners to have a deeper understanding of passive sentence which is a common language phenomenon of scientific English and Chinese, and also will help them to have a more profound understanding of the similarities and differences between them. Especially’ it can play a guiding role in improving the translation teaching and perfecting translation strategies of passive sentences in scientific English and Chinese.The similarities of passive sentences in scientific English and Chinese have been studied from the following three aspects:forms, semantic meanings and functions. On forms, firstly, they both have the property of markedness. The mark of English passive sentence is "Be+V-ed", and the mark of Chinese passive sentence is "Bei[被], Rang[让], Gei[给], You[由], Zao[遭], Shou[受]......+V". Secondly, they both have the same situations to deal with the agents which can be divided into two situations "reserving agents" and "omitting agents"; On semantic meanings, they both indicate the property of agency which contains explicit agency and implicit agency, because of which, they both infallibly indicate the property of receptivity; On functions, the use of passive sentence in scientific English and Chinese can emphasize the objectivity of expression, maintain the economy of communication and highlight the importance of information.The differences of passive sentences in scientific English and Chinese have been correspondingly studied from the following three aspects:forms, semantic meanings, and applications. On forms, firstly, they differ in the use frequency of prototype marks."Be+V-ed" is the prototype mark of English passive sentence,"Bei[被]+V" is the prototype mark of Chinese passive sentence, and the prototype passive is more frequently used in scientific English than that in scientific Chinese. Secondly, they differ in their agents’ locations and occurrence frequency. The agent in English passive normally follows the passive verb while it always occurs before the passive verb in Chinese passive. The mark "By" is omitted together with the agent in English passive, however, it is only the agent but not the passive mark like "Bei"[被] or "Rang"[让] that is omitted in Chinese passive. And passive sentences with agents in scientific Chinese are significantly more than those in scientific English; On semantic meanings, Chinese passive has a higher degree of affectedness than English passive and is more often to show a negative semantic property, while English passive is more often to show a neutral semantic property; On applications, the use frequency of passive sentence in scientific Chinese is much lower than that in scientific English. and the reasons for this difference include three points:philosophy and thinking mode, language feature and emotional function.In addition, two implications have been put forward. Firstly, in scientific translation teaching, it is desirable for teachers to instruct the students to explore bilingual thinking modes in depth and combine translation methods with bilingual features; And secondly, in scientific translation, two translation strategies are suggested:one is emphasizing the passive marks and preserving the passive meaning, and the other one is refining the words and meeting the original styles.Lastly, two new insights have been pointed out. The first one is that the verb in English table structure "Be+V-ed" should not belong to the category of adjective but the category of verb. And the second one is that Chinese Bei-construction is not always meant to be unsatisfactory.