11/01/06Penn State1 Bridging contrastive study and language acquisition research A corpus-based study of passives in English and Chinese Richard Xiao [email protected]

11/01/06 Penn State 1

Bridging contrastive study and language acquisition research A corpus-based study of passives

in English and Chinese

Richard [email protected]

mailto:[email protected]


Overview of the talk

• Corpora for contrastive study

• Passives in English and Chinese

• Passive errors in Chinese learner English


Corpora for contrastive study


Parallel corpora? No

• Two types of multilingual corpora• Parallel corpus = source texts +

translations• Some misunderstandings, e.g.

– ‘translation equivalence is the best available basis of comparison’ (James 1980: 178)

– ‘studies based on real translations are the only sound method for contrastive analysis’ (Santos 1996: i)

• But…


Evidence of translationese (1)

• An unrepresentative special variant• A ‘third code’ (Frawley 1984: 168)• Four core patterns of lexical use (Laviosa 1998)

– a relatively low proportion of lexical words over function words

– a relatively high proportion of high-frequency words over low-frequency words

– a relatively great repetition of most frequent words – less variety in most frequently used words


Evidence of translationese (2)

• Beyond the lexical level -– Normalization, simplification (Baker

1993/1999)– Explicitation (Øverås 1998)– Sanitization (Kenny 1998)– Aspect markers twice as frequent in L1

Chinese (McEnery & Xiao 2002)

• Parallel corpora: unreliable for contrastive study


Comparable corpora: Yes

• Comparable corpus = same sampling techniques + similar balance and representativeness

• Well suited for contrastive study

• Some E-C contrastive studies– Aspect marking (e.g. McEnery, Xiao & Mo 2003)– Situation aspect (e.g. Xiao & McEnery (2004a)– Collocation and semantic prosody (e.g. Xiao &

McEnery 2005)


Passives constructionsin English and Chinese


Corpus data

• Two English corpora– Freiburg-LOB (FLOB)– BNCdemo

• Two Chinese corpora– Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese

(LCMC)– LDC CallHome Mandarin Transcripts


Text categories in FLOB and LCMC

Code Text category No. of samples Proportion

A Press reportage 44 8.8%

B Press editorials 27 5.4%

C Press reviews 17 3.4%

D Religion 17 3.4%

E Skills, trades and hobbies 38 7.6%

F Popular lore 44 8.8%

G Biographies and essays 77 15.4%

H Miscellaneous (reports, official documents)

30 6%

J Science (academic prose) 80 16%

K General fiction 29 5.8%

L Mystery/detective fiction 24 4.8%

M Science fiction 6 1.2%

N Adventure fiction 29 5.8%

P Romantic fiction 29 5.8%

R Humour 9 1.8%

Total 500 100%


Two major passives types in English

• Be vs. get-passives– Dynamic vs. stative

• e.g. Go and get/*be changed! (BNCdemo)

– Infinitival complements• e.g. they liked to be/*get seen to go to church (BNCdemo)

– Contrast in overall frequencies• 955 vs. 31 instances of be-passives vs. get-passives per

100K words

– Writing vs. speech• Normalised frequencies (per 100K words)

– Be-passives: 854 (W) vs. 101 (S)– Get-passives: 5 (W) vs. 26 (S)


Long vs. short forms by register

• Long vs. short passives

• Distribution in speech & writing

• Short passives more frequent in S than W– LL=209.225 for 1

d.f., p<0.001Corpus

FLOBBNCdemo

Pe

rce

nt

120

100

80

60

40

20

0

Agent type

Short passive

Long passive


Long vs. short forms by passive type• Get-passives are more

likely than be-passives to occur in short forms– LL=76.015 for 1 d.f., p<0.001

• Agents in get-passives Impersonal, e.g. – got caught by the police

• Inanimate, e.g. – got knocked down by a car

• Personal agents: informationally dense, semantically indispensable, e.g. – The bleeding fat girl, he got

asked out by her. (BNC)

Passive type

get-passivebe-passives

Per

cent

120

100

80

60

40

20

0

Agent type

Short passive

Long passive


Adverbials in English passives

• Passives with no adverbial are much more common than those with an adverbial – true for both be- and get-passives

• Adverbials are more frequent in be- passives than get-passives

– 17.7% of be-passives; 7% of get-passives

• Less diversified in get-passives– Typically ‘have an intensifying or

focusing role’ (Carter & McCarthy 1999: 53)

• Proportions of be-passives with an adverbial are similar in S & W

– 19.5% (S) vs. 17.3% (W)• BUT the proportion of get-passives

with an adverbial is much greater in W than S

– 15.2% (W) vs. 6.6% (S)

Passive type

get-passivebe-passive

Pe

rce

nt

120

100

80

60

40

20

0

Adverbial type

No adverbial

Adverbial


Pragmatic meanings

Passive type Negative Positive Neutral

Be-passive 15% 4.7% 80.3%

Get-passive 37.7% 3.4% 58.9%


Collocation analysis• Observation of pragmatic meanings of get-

passives is supported by collocation analysis– z score>3.0, frequency>3, L0-R1

• Collocates of get-passives are more likely to show a negative pragmatic meaning– Negative get-passives: 46.5% in BNCdemo (one

collocate in FLOB: married)– Negative be-passives: 27% in BNCdemo and 8% in

FLOB– Get-passives NOT necessarily more frequently

negative in S• Proportions of negative cases: 45.8% (W) vs. 37.3% (S)

– Exceptionally high co-occurrence frequency of a few neutral collocates of get-passives in S (married , paid , dressed , changed)


Collocation vs. style

• Get-passives are more informal in style– More restricted in collocation, more likely to

refer to daily activities and be used in informal expressions

• GET - dressed, changed, weighed, fed (i.e. eat), washed, cleaned

• GET - pricked, hooked, mixed (up), carried (away), muddled (up), sacked, kicked (out), stuffed, thrown (out), chucked, pissed, nicked

– Rarely found among the top 100 collocates of be-passives


Style vs. distribution• Stylistic difference >

distribution• Be-passives: over 8 times as

frequent in FLOB (A-R) as in BNCdemo (S)– Of written genres, more

common in informative texts (A-J) than imaginative writing (K-R)

– Exceptionally frequent in H & J (cf. Biber 1988)

• Get-passives typically occur in speech and colloquial, informal genres– Over 5 times as frequent in

speech as in writing– Of written genres,

exceptionally frequent in E (leisure) & R.

be-passive

get-passive

Passive type

AB

CE

FG

HJ

KL

MN

PR

S

Genre

0.00

10.00

20.00


Syntactic functions

• Finite vs. non-finite– Finite: predicate– Non-finite: adjectival, adverbial, complement, object,

subject

• Typically used as predicates– 97% of be-passives and 96% of get-passives– Sometimes found in object and complement positions– Rarely used as subjects

• Distribution of get-passives is more balanced across syntactic functions


Passives in Chinese: Notional, syntactic vs. lexical

• Marked (47%) vs. unmarked (53%) passives– Unmarked passives: notional or pseudo-passives– Topic sentences (topic + comment)

• e.g. fan (meal) <*bei (PSV)> zuo-hao (do-ready) le (PERF) ‘The dinner is cooked (ready)’ (LCMC)

• Syntactic vs. lexical passives– Passivised verbs do not inflect morphologically– Syntactic passive markers

• Bei: the most frequent, ‘universal’ passive marker• Gei, jiao, rang: not fully grammaticalised, typically in

colloquial genres & dialects• Wei…suo: archaic, only in formal written genres

– Lexical passives: ai, shou(dao), zao(dao) • Inherently passive


Long vs. short passives

• Bei and gei: in both long (40%, 43%) and short (60%, 57%) passives

• Wei, jiao and rang: only in long passives• Shou and zao: more frequent in short (68%,

63%) than long (32%, 37%) passives• Ai: almost exclusively in short passives (97%)• Long passives: in speech and colloquial genres;

short passives: typically in written genres such as J, H and G


Agent NPs in syntactic vs. lexical passives

• Can be systematically interpreted as attributive modifiers of (nominalised) verbs in lexical passives, but cannot in syntactic passives, cf.– A) danshi (but) zhe (this) yi (one) jianyi (proposal)

zaodao (suffer) Xide (West Germany) zongli (prime minister) <de (PRT)> jujue (reject/rejection) ‘But this proposal was rejected by the prime minister of West Germany’ (LCMC)

– B) wo-men (we) na-ge (that-CL) che (car), bei (PSV) Xinhuan (Xinhuan) <*de (PRT)> nong-huai (ruin) le (PERF) ‘Our car was ruined by Xinhuan’ (CallHome)


Syntactic functions

• Most frequent in the predicate position– 76% of syntactic passives (74% of bei); 75%

of lexical passives

• Non-predicate uses– Attributive modifier: second most important

syntactic function (14%)– Uncommon as subjects or complements


Interaction with aspect

• Interacting with aspect closely (Xiao and McEnery 2004b)– Syntactic passives convey an aspectual meaning of result

• Bare passives account for the largest proportions of syntactic (40%) and lexical (78%) passives

• BUT perfective -le is not uncommon in both syntactic (17%) and lexical (11%) passives

• RVCs and resultative de-structure are more common in syntactic passives; bare forms are more frequent in lexical passives

• Passivised verbs in bare forms are uncommon in syntactic passives, especially when they function as predicates


Pragmatic meanings

• Typically express a negative pragmatic meaning– “usually of unfavourable meanings” (Chao 1968: 703)

• Universal passive marker bei derived from its main verb usage, meaning ‘suffer’ (Wang 1957)

• Under the influence of Western languages, Chinese passives are no longer restricted to verbs with an inflictive meaning

– Proportions of negative pragmatic meaning• Syntactic passives: gei (68%), rang (67%), bei (52%), jiao

(50%), wei (19%)• Lexical passives: ai (100%), zao (100%), shou (65%)

– Collocates of bei-passives• 51% negative, 39% neutral, 10% positive


Distribution across genres

• 11 times as frequent in writing as in speech• Most common in religious writing (D) and mystery/

detective stories (L)– Mystery/detective stories are often concerned with victims who

suffer from various kinds of mishaps or what criminals do to them– In religions, human beings are passive animals whose fate is

controlled by some kind of supernatural force• Least frequent in news editorials (C) and official

documents (H)• Universal passive marker bei

– Contrast in proportions between long vs. short passives typically less marked in 5 types of fiction (K-P), humour (R) and speech (S)

– Predominantly negative in speech (S); more often than not negative in news editorials (C), mystery/detective stories (L), and adventure stories (N); but rarely negative in official documents (H) and academic prose (J)


Contrast: Overall frequencies• Passive constructions are significantly more

common in English than in Chinese (nearly 10 times as frequent)– English (be-)passives occur in both dynamic and

stative situations; Chinese passives can only occur in dynamic events

– Chinese passives typically have a negative pragmatic meaning; English passives (esp. be-passives) do not

– Unmarked notional passives are more common in Chinese

• Chinese topic-oriented; English subject-oriented– English tends to over-use passives, esp. in formal

writing (Quirk 1968; Baker 1985); Chinese tends to avoid syntactic passives wherever possible

• Chinese uses topic sentences instead


Contrast: Long vs. short passives

• The agent NP in the long passive follows the passivised verb in English but precedes it in Chinese

• Short passives are predominant in English; long passives are not uncommon in Chinese– Passives are used in English to avoid mentioning the agent– The agent must normally be spelt out in Chinese passives

• This constraint has become more relaxed nowadays

• When it is difficult to spell out the agent…– Passives are used in English– In Chinese, a vague expression such as ren/youren ‘someone’

or renmen ‘people’ is used instead of using passives


Contrast: Pragmatic meanings

• Chinese passives are more frequently used with a negative pragmatic meaning than English passives– Chinese passives were used at early stages primarily

for unpleasant or undesirable events; the semantic constraint on the use of passives has become more relaxed, especially in writing

– Rank order of meaning categories• English: neutral > negative > positive• Chinese: negative > neutral > positive

– In this respect, the get-passive is more akin to Chinese passives than the unmarked be-passive – more stylistically oriented


Contrast: Syntactic functions

• Passives are most frequently used in the predicate position in English and Chinese

• Proportion of passives used as predicates in English (over 95%) is much greater than that in Chinese (76% on average)

• More frequent in the object than subject position in both languages

• More frequent as attributive modifiers in Chinese; more frequent as complements in English

• Passives in Chinese (esp. bei-passives) are more balanced across syntactic functions than English passives

• Chinese passives in the predicate position typically interact with aspect but this interaction is not obvious in English


Contrast: Distribution

• Unmarked English (be-)passives more frequent in informative (A-J) than imaginative writing (K-R); get-passives more common in speech and informal written genres– H and J show very high proportions of passives in English, but

they have the lowest proportions of passives in Chinese• Unmarked English passives function to mark objectivity and a formal

style but Chinese passives do not have this function

• In Chinese, wei typically occurs in formal written genres; jiao, rang and gei are used in colloquial genres– Mystery/detective stories (L) and religious writing (D) show

exceptionally high proportions of passives in Chinese• Different distributions are associated with different

functions– English (be-)passives: an impersonal, objective and formal style– Chinese passives: ‘inflictive voice’


Contrast: Typological differences

• Klaiman’s (1991: 23) 3-way classification of grammatical voices– Basic (unmarked) voice: active/middle voice– Derived/non-basic (marked) voice: passivisation– Pragmatic voice: involving ‘assignment to some

sentential arguments of some special pragmatic status or salience’ (Klaiman 1991: 24)

• English passive: derived voice• Chinese passive: pragmatic voice


Passive errors in Chinese Learner English


Corpora

• CLEC: the Chinese Learner English Corpus– One million words– Essays– Five proficiency levels

• LOCNESS: the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays– 324,304 words– Essays– British A-Level children and British/American

university students


Under-use of passives

Corpus Words Frequency Per 100K words

LL score

p value

CLEC 1,070,602 9,711 907

LL=1235.6

1.d.f.

p<0.001LOCNESS 324,304 5,465 1,685


Long vs. short passives

• Long passives are slightly more frequent in Chinese learner English– Long passives in CLEC

• 9.14%: 888 out of 9,711

– Long passives in LOCNESS• 8.44%: 461 out of 5,465

• Not statistically significant– LL=2.184, 1 d.f., p=0.139


Pragmatic meanings

• Passives are more frequently negative in Chinese learner English– CLEC

• Negative: 25.7%• Positive: 5.9%• Neutral: 68.4%

– LOCNESS• Negative: 16.8%• Positive: 4.4%• Neutral: 78.8%

– LL=7.4, 2 d.f., p=0.025

Corpus

LOCNESSCLEC

Pe

rce

nt

120

100

80

60

40

20

0

Meanings

Positive

Neutral

Negative


Passive errors vs. learner levels

• Learners at higher levels generally make fewer passive errors

• Four major types of passive errors

• Under-use is the most important error type

• Learning curve is not a straight line, especially for difficult itemsProficiency level

ST6ST5ST4ST3ST2

Fre

qu

en

cy p

er

20

0K

wo

rds

300

200

100

0

Error type

Aux. omission

Misformation

Overuse

Underuse

All error types


Error types vs. learner levels• Error types are associated with learner levels

– LL=51.774, 12.d.f., p<0.001• Similar learner groups make similar types of errors

– ST2 >> ST3: statistically significant (LL=27.303, 3 d.f., p<0.001)– ST3 >> ST4: not significant (LL=6.955, 3 d.f., p=0.073)– ST4 >> ST5: statistically significant (LL=18.563, 3 d.f., p<0.001)– ST5 >> ST6: not significant (LL=6.987, 3 d.f., p=0.072)

ST2 ST3/ST4 ST5/ST6 (High (Junior/Senior (Junior/Senior

school non-English English major

students) major students) students)


Under-use: L1 transfer

• Borne out of the contrastive analysis• Confirmed by the CLEC-LOCNESS comparison• Result of L1 transfer• Typically occur with verbs whose Chinese

equivalents are not normally used in passives, e.g.– A birthday party will hold in Lily’s house. (ST2)– …or our efforts will waste. (ST4)– The woman in white called Anne Catherick. (ST5)

• Also under the influence of Chinese topic sentences– The supper had done. (ST2)


Over-use: three major types

• Intransitive verbs used in passives, e.g.– A very unhappy thing was happened in this week. (ST2)– Their friendships are not died off with the passing of time (ST4)– I was graduated from Zhongshan University (ST5)

• Misuse of ergative verbs, e.g.– …the science <sic. secince> is developed quickly (ST4)– …infant mortality was declined (ST4)

• Passive training effects, e.g.– …many machines <sic. machine> and appliances <sic.

appliance> are used electricity as power (ST5)– Because they have been mastered everything of this job…

(ST4)


Misformation: L1 interference

• Result of L1 interference• Related to morphological inflections

– Passivised verbs do not inflect in L1 Chinese

• Tend to use uninflected verbs or misspelt past participles in passives, e.g.– The door is wrap with two coats of iron (ST5)– His relatives can not stop him, because his choice is

protect by the laws. (ST6)– Since the People’s Republic of China <sic. china>

was found on October 1, 1949… (ST2)– I was moving at that time, but I didn't cry. (ST2)


Auxiliary omission: L1 interference

• Result of L1 interference– Unmarked ‘notional passives’ are abundant in

Chinese

• Tend to omit or misuse auxiliaries in passives, e.g.– …and we will not satisfied with what we have done.

(ST4) – In China, since the new China established, people’s

life has gotten <sic. goten> better and better. (ST3)– I am not a smoker, but why do we forced to be a

second-hand smoker? (ST5)


Conclusions

• While passive constructions express a basic passive meaning in both English and Chinese, they also show a range of differences which are associated with their different functions in the two languages

• Most passive-related errors made by Chinese learners of English can be accounted for from a contrastive perspective

• A combination of contrastive study and learner corpus analysis can bring insights into language acquisition research


Thank you!


References (1)• Baker, M. (1993) ‘Corpus linguistics and translation studies’. In M.

Baker, G. Francis & E. Tognini-Bonelli (eds.) Text and technology (pp. 233-52). Amsterdam: Benjamins.

• Baker, M. (1999) ‘The role of corpora in investigating the linguistic behaviour of professional translators’. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 4: 281-98.

• Baker, S. (1985) 1985. The Practical Stylist [6th ed.]. New York: Harper & Row.

• Biber, D. (1988) Variation across Speech and Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

• Carter, R. and McCarthy, M. (1999) ‘The English get-passive in spoken discourse’. English Language and Literature 3(1): 41-58.

• Chao, Y. (1968) Grammar of Spoken Chinese. Berkeley: University of California Press.

• Frawley, W. (1984) ‘Prolegomenon to a theory of translation’. In W. Frawley (ed.) Translation: Literary, linguistic and philosophical perspectives (pp. 159-75). London: Associated University Press.


References (2)• James, C. (1980) Contrastive Analysis. London: Longman.• Kenny, D. (1998) ‘Creatures of habit? What translators usually do

with words?’ Meta 43(4). • Klaiman, M. (1991) Grammatical Voice. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press. • Laviosa, S. (1998) ‘Core patterns of lexical use in a comparable

corpus of English narrative prose’. Meta 43(4). • McEnery, A and Xiao, Z. (2002) ‘Domains, text types, aspect

marking and English-Chinese translation’. Languages in Contrast 2(2): 211-31.

• McEnery, A., Xiao, Z. and Mo, L. (2003) ‘Aspect marking in English and Chinese’. Literary and Linguistic Computing 18(4): 361-78.

• Mcenery, A., Xiao, Z. and Tono, Y. (2005) Corpus-Based Language Studies. London: Routledge.

• Øverås, S. (1998) ‘In search of the third code: An investigation of norms in literary translation’. Meta 43(4).


References (3)• Quirk, R. (1968) The Use of English [2nd ed.]. London: Longman. • Santos, D. (1996). Tense and Aspect in English and Portuguese: A

contrastive semantical study. PhD thesis. Universidade Tecnica de Lisboa.

• Wang, L. (1957) ‘Hanyu beidongju de fazhan (Development of Chinese passives)’. Yuyanxue Luncong (Studies in Linguistics) Vol. 1. Beijing: Commercial Printing. House.

• Xiao, Z. and McEnery, A. (2004a) ‘A corpus-based two-level model of situation aspect’. Journal of Linguistics 40(2): 325-63.

• Xiao, Z. and McEnery, A. (2004b) Aspect in Mandarin Chinese. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

• Xiao, Z. and McEnery, A. (2006) ‘Collocation, semantic prosody and near synonymy: a cross-linguistic perspective’. Applied Linguistics. [In press]

• Xiao, Z, McEnery, A. and Qian, Y. (2006) ‘Passive constructions in English and Chinese: a corpus-based contrastive study’. Languages in Contrast 3(1).

Documents

11/01/06Penn State1 Bridging contrastive study and language acquisition research A corpus-based study of passives in English and Chinese Richard Xiao [email protected]