A Typological Approach To Case Alignment Of Passive Category In English And Chinese

Voice is a kind of grammatical category which expresses meanings of sentences in different ways to highlight the emphasis of the phrase.Voice is the linguists’ focus,especially passive voice.In world languages,every language has its grammar and word order which give rise to different passive representations.The most widely discussed area is the semantic study of passive,which is the basic study of passive and the most normal and traditional perspective,including the comparative study of active and passive constructions.The study on case alignments on the passive category is still in its infancy.Domestic studies are mainly about the superficial study of case alignments and the ergative-absolutive case marking in Chinese.Few analyses involve the conditioned factors.Such related study in English passive category is in rare.there is no exact and systematic explanation about the case alignment on the passive category from a typological perspective.In our thesis,the passive category is analyzed systematically from a cross-linguistic perspective,trying to find the individuality of languages,which provides a wilder research category.Therefore,it is necessary to explore English-Chinese passive category from the perspective of case alignment.Ergative-absolutive case alignment in English-Chinese passive category will make the special structures accord with the grammatical rules.From the typological perspective,this thesis discusses representations of passive in world language.And then similarities and differences of ergative-absolutive case alignments between English and Chinese provide a new perspective to the research on the passive category.Firstly,this thesis introduces representations of passive in world languages,especially in nominative-accusative languages and ergative-absolutive languages and explains similarities and individualities in English-Chinese passive categories.Then the thesis presents the nominative-accusative case alignments in ergative-absolutive languages,trying to explain the split case in English and Chinese.Finally,this thesis explains ergative case alignments in nominative-accusative languages,exploring the conditioned factors and combines with the nominative-accusative case alignments in ergative-absolutive languages to find out the universals in world languages.The major findings of the study are:1)Many linguists claim that ergative-absolutive languages have nominative-accusative case alignment.The objects in transitive clauses have the same syntactic case alignment as the subjects in intransitive clauses.Based on that we can propose that nominative-accusative languages have ergative-absolutive case alignment,which is conditioned by the semantic characteristics of ergative verbs.In Chinese,the related verbs have such properties,“StatusChange”,“Psychological Change”,“Verb & Adjectives” and “Self Change”.In English,the verbs have such semantic characteristics,“Change of State”.“Increase & Decrease”,“Creation”and “Inchoative”.2)At home,there are few linguists who explore the case alignments in the nominative-accusative language system.The representatives are Lv(1978),Jin Linxin(2014)and etc.The thesis has a reanalysis about the middle construction and verb resultative construction,explaining ergativity in English and Chinese from the perspective of case alignment,which is different from the analysis of Huang Zhengde’s unaccusative hypothesis.In English,the typical middle construction is ‘NP+V+ADV’ which omits the agent and has passive meaning,and it is accepted as having ergative-absolutive case alignment.Such linguistic phenomenon is associated with the semantic properties of verbs.3)The ergativity in English and Chinese has some differences and similarities in semantics and syntax.From the perspective of semantics,similarities: the referent of ergative verbs in English and Chinese are objects,not subjects;Ergative constructions in English and Chinese all describe the concrete events and have the endpoint in time;Patient always experience the change of state.Differences:ergative constructions in English and Chinese express the endpoint of the event with“了/le”,“过/guo”,“已/yi”,“已经/yijing”or the tense of past or perfective aspect.In Chinese“已/yi”,“已经/yijing”and the tense/aspect marking can be carried by“了/le”,“过/guo”,even omitted and the sentences are appropriate.In English,the tense/aspect marking is the morpheme that the verb has the change of state,such as“–ed”or“have+ed”.When“already”are inserted,the sentence only has one aspect/aspect:“have+ed”.Other constructions which to express the finished states are inappropriate.From the perspective of syntax,similarities: the ergative verbs in transitive clauses are two-arguments predicate,while in intransitive clauses,they are one-argument ones;In the tense/aspect,it is always in perfective aspect or past tense.Differences: diversity features affixes in English ergative verbs of derivation.Singleness features those in Chinese ergative verbs of derivation.This study has made a certain theoretical breakthrough in language typology and linguistics.On the one hand,the study of case alignment on English-Chinese passive categories explains research insufficiency of their conditioned factors and the syntactic explanation enriches the typological achievement,which provides some meaningful inspirations and references to future study on the passive category in world language.On the other hand,this thesis presents a theoretical framework for the research of individuality and universality of English-Chinese passive category from the perspective of case alignment,which is helpful for English teachingand Mandarin Chinese teaching.