| Passive, as a common linguistic phenomenon, is widely applied in news discourseand scientific texts. It has long been studied by a number of linguists and grammarians,but they mainly focus on its syntactic features and semantic meanings. And thosestudying from functional perspective are frequently related to ideational and textuallevel, paying little attention to interpersonal function. Meanwhile, functional grammarholds that the passive voice shares the same interpersonal meaning with itscounterpart. However, the writer believes the interpersonal meanings are differentbecause choice is meaning. Therefore, this thesis is carrying out a contrastive study onthe interpersonal meaning of both English and Chinese passives, attempting to solvethe following questions:1. what is the frequency and distribution of the passive inEnglish and Chinese newspapers?2. What are the specific interpersonal meanings,and what are the similarities and differences?To get a quantitative and qualitative analysis, twenty pieces of news are selectedfrom The New York Times, USA Today, People’s Daily and Guangming Ribao, withChinese and English news10pieces respectively. These newspapers, representativeand authentic, not only share a large circulation at home and abroad, but also reflect acertain ideology of the parties. Through the study, it is found that:1. English passiveoccurs more often than Chinese passive, but both languages enjoy a higher frequencyon the agentless passive compared with the agentful passive. The reason is associatedwith the characteristics of both languages;2. In mood system, declarative takes apredominant proportion in English and Chinese passive, realizing the speech role ofinformation-giving. As to the distribution of the primary tenses, the past tense in bothlanguages takes the first place, the present tense, taking the second place, and thefuture tense, the least proportion. The use of the past tense can create a sense ofobjectivity and meanwhile help the journalist avoid responsibilities;3. In modality system, the frequency of “will†in English and “会†in Chinese is the highest. The twomodal verbs of median value are to express the journalist’s confirmation of the eventso as to make it authentic and truthful;4. Investigated from a clause-above level, thetwo share similarities on showing objectivity, escaping responsibilities andhighlighting. They differ in expression of negative and in devices to maintainobjectivity.These findings show that it is feasible and rewarding to make a contrastive studyon the interpersonal meaning of passive in both languages. Apart from adding a betterunderstanding to the ideology of English and Chinese, it will also enlighten us in theteaching and learning of passive. |
