| As one of the most common constructions in English and Chinese,passive constructions have become a spotlight in syntactic studies.Previous studies on the comparison between English and Chinese passive constructions are not systematic and comprehensive in that they mainly focus on simple marked passives and shed little light on complex marked passives and unmarked passives.Besides,prior studies often attribute the differences between the two languages to extra-linguistic factors（e.g.,culture,cognition）.Hence,there is still a need to explore the linguistic-internal factors that lead to such similarities and differences.Adopting a generative approach,this thesis makes a thorough contrastive study of English and Chinese passive constructions under the framework of Optimality Theory（OT）（Prince&Smolensky,1993/2004）.It aims to explore the generative mechanism of English and Chinese passive constructions,and then to provide a linguistic-internal explanation for the similarities and differences those structures in the two languages.Based on the defining criteria of passive constructions in previous studies,this study investigates all possible structures relevant to passive constructions and captures each structure using the constraint hierarchy in OT.The main findings are as follows:（1）The current classification of Chinese passive constructions needs to be further revised.On the whole,English and Chinese have both marked and unmarked passive constructions.English marked passive constructions can be further divided into simple ones and complex ones.However,previous studies mainly discuss Chinese simple marked passives.Complex marked passives are relatively untouched.In fact,such structures（e.g.,他没写作业被发现了）do exist in Chinese.Therefore,this thesis holds that Chinese marked passive constructions include both simple and complex ones.It is the first time that Chinese complex marked passive constructions receive their due attention.（2）As for word order,Chinese and English simple marked passive constructions are similar in that the object NP must be raised to the position of the subject.However,the two languages are different in complex marked passive constructions and unmarked passive constructions.In terms of complex marked passive constructions,English has two variants:CP+be+V-ed and It+is+V-ed+CP,whereas Chinese only has CP+被+VP.In terms of unmarked passive constructions,both NP+VP+AdvP and NP+be+V-ing express passive meaning in English,while only NP+（AdvP）+VP conveys passive meaning in Chinese.Within VP shells（Larson,1988）,the deep structure of both English and Chinese passive constructions can be formalized as[vP1 BECOME[vP2 X CAUSE[VP V Y]]]（X and Y signify arguments）.More specifically,English is[vP1 be/get[vP2 X CAUSE[VP V Y]]]and Chinese is[vP1被[vP2 X所/给[VPV Y]]].（3）The constraint hierarchy for English passive constructions is{THETA-CRIT>>OB-SPEC>>FULL-INT,END-WEIGHT>>STAY};the one for Chinese passive constructions is{FULL-INT,THETA-CRIT>>OB-SPEC>>END-WEIGHT>>STAY}.The passivization of the object NP is the same in both English and Chinese.The object NP should be put forward to the subject position,which can be captured by the same dominance relationship{THETA-CRIT>>OB-SPEC>>END-WEIGHT>>STAY}in the two languages.On the other hand,the passivization of the object CP is different between the two languages.In English,the CP can either emerge as the subject,or it can remain at the original position,while an expletive it is added to the subject position.Such pattern can be explained by the ranking OB-SPEC>>FULL-INT.On the contrary,CP in Chinese passive constructions must rise to fill the subject position,and an expletive is banned because FULL-INT governs OB-SPEC.Such differences in constraint rankings further prove that English is subject-prominent and Chinese is topic-prominent.Through the interaction of universal constraints,this study reveals the generative mechanism of English and Chinese passive constructions and again proves the strong explanatory power of OT.This contributes to the incorporation of contrastive linguistics with universal grammar and more matches the original purpose of generative grammar. |
