earticle

영어

One typical instance of language universals is the passive construction in languages, which has long been discussed on whether there exists its universal pattern or structure or every language has its own unique set of the passive voice. Chandra and Sahoo (2010) abandon the idea of construction particularism, relying on the underlying similarities of the passive construction of several asian languages. Mahajan (1994) claims that the Hindi passives behave differently in that they neither demote the subject into the prepositional phrase nor promote the object to the subject position. Chinese is one of the languages that need to clarify the structure of the passive voice for the justification of language universals. This research classifies the passive voice in languages into 4 types, and identifies the core properties common to all 4 types. Pointing out the problems of the previous analyses of the bei passive construction in Chinese, this research proposes an alternative by treating the complement of bei as a relative construction, where the agent of the event remains inside the adjunct clause. What this research achieves are that both the long and short forms of the passive construction in Chinese are analyzed in a unified formal way and the Chinese passive can be considered another type of the passive voice in the sense of language universals.