A Study Of The Functions Of Passive Sentences In English For Science And Technology Based On Textual Function

Passive sentence is a very important grammatical structure. English passive sentences are widely used in verbal communication due to their particular textual and pragmatic functions. Many scholars have concentrated on the comparative study of Chinese and English passive structures. However, Systemic Functional Grammar considers that choosing passive or active sentence in a discourse will bring different textual functions.As is known to all, with science and technology being widely attached importance to, English for Science and Technology is playing an increasingly salient role. One of the main features of English for Science and Technology is the widely used passive sentences. Hence, based on the previous study, this thesis analyzes the passive sentences in English for Science and Technology from the perspective of Functional Grammar. It is expected that people can understand and write English for Science and Technology better. Moreover, the thesis hopes to inspire teaching and translation. At the same time, this thesis encourages people to learn language with functions so that their communicative competence will be improved.The thesis selects twelve articles from the authoritative magazine Science randomly. Then the passive sentences of the articles are analyzed from the perspective of one of the three meta-functions of language, i.e. textual function. Through the qualitative analysis, three research questions are answered.The study finds that the textual functions of the passive sentences in English for Science and Technology are topic-setting function, topic-highlighting function and textual cohesion and coherence function based on thematic structure. Based on information structure, the textual functions of passive sentences in English for Science and Technology are topic-shifting function, focus highlighting function and focus-contrasting function. In addition, the thesis analyzes why using passive sentence is more appropriate than using active sentence in some contexts in terms of the three forms of cohesion, or to be specific, the cohesion function.