16/07/2005 CL 2005, Birmingham1

Passive constructions in English and Chinese: a corpus-based study

Tony McEnery

Richard Xiao

16/07/2005 CL 2005, Birmingham2

Aims and objectives

Using comparable corpus data– to explore passives in written and spoken English– to explore passives in written and spoken

Chinese– to contrast passives in the two languages

16/07/2005 CL 2005, Birmingham3

Corpora

English– FLOB: ca. one million words, written British English, 500

samples, 15 text categories, 1991-1992– BNCdemo: ca. four million words, the demographically

sampled component of the BNC (conversational data) Chinese

– LCMC: ca. one million words, written Mandarin Chinese, 500 samples, 15 text categories, 1991-1992

http://www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/corplang/lcmc– LDC CallHome Mandarin: ca. 300,000 words, telephone

conversations, 120 transcripts of 5-10-minute continuous telephone conversations

16/07/2005 CL 2005, Birmingham4

Text categories covered FLOB/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 Adventure 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%

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Passives in English (1)

Be vs. get-passives– Be-passives occur in both dynamic and stative situations– Get-passives occur only in dynamic situations

Go and get/*be changed!– Only be-passives are appropriate in infinitival complements

they liked to be/*get seen to go to church– Be-passives are predominantly more frequent than get-passives

955 vs. 31 instances per 100K words in FLOB/BNCdemo– Be-passives are more frequent in writing while get-passives are

more frequent in spoken data Normalised frequencies (per 100K words)

– Be-passives: 854 in FLOB and 101 in BNCdemo– Get-passives: 5 in FLOB and 26 in BNCdemo

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Passives in English (2)

Long vs. short passives (1)– For both be and get-

passives, short forms are much more frequent than long forms in written as well as spoken data

– Short passives are significantly more common in spoken than written English

LL=209.225 for 1 df, p<0.001Corpus

FLOBBNCdemo

Pe

cen

tag

e

120

100

80

60

40

20

0

Agent type

agentless

agent

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Passives in English (3)

Long vs. short passives (2)– Get-passives are more likely

than be-passives to occur without an agent

LL=76.015 for 1 df, p<0.001– The agents in get-passives are

typically impersonal (e.g. got caught by the police) or even inanimate (e.g. got knocked down by a car)

When personal agents appear, they are typically informationally dense and thus semantically indispensable

– e.g. The bleeding fat girl, he got asked out by her.

Passive type

get-passivebe-passive

Pe

rce

nta

ge

120

100

80

60

40

20

0

Agent type

agentless

agent

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Passives in English (4)

Adverbials in be and get-passives– Adverbials are more frequent in be

than get-passives 17.7% for be-passives and 7% for

get-passives– Types of adverbials are less varied

in get than be-passives Typically they ‘have an intensifying

or focusing role’ in get-passives (Carter and McCarthy 1999: 53)

– Proportions of be-passives with an adverbial are similar in writing and speech

17.3% vs. 19.5% in FLOB and BNCdemo

– Proportion of get-passives with an adverbial is greater in writing than in speech

15.2% vs. 6.6% in FLOB and BNCdemo

Passive type

get-passivebe-passive

Pe

rce

nta

ge

120

100

80

60

40

20

0

Adverbial type

No adverbial

Adverbial

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Passives in English (5)

Semantic and pragmatic properties (1)– Get-passives are frequently used to indicate speaker

attitude towards the events described (typically a negative evaluation) while be-passives do not appear to be used in this way

Passive type Negative Positive Neutral

Be-passive 15% 4.7% 80.3%

Get-passive 37.7% 3.4% 58.9%

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Passives in English (7)

Semantic and pragmatic properties (2)– Collocations (L0-R1, z score>3.0, frequency>3) of

get-passives are more likely to show an inflictive meaning than be-passives

Get-passive: 46.5% (BNCdemo) and (married in FLOB); be-passive: 27% (BNCdemo) and 8% (FLOB)

However, get-passives are NOT necessarily more frequently negative in spoken English

– Negative instances: FLOB: 45.8%; BNCdemo: 37.3% Exceptionally high co-occurrence frequency of a few

neutral verbs, e.g. married , paid , dressed , changed

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Passives in English (8)

– Semantic and pragmatic properties (3) Collocations reveal that get-passives are more informal in style

than be-passives– The get-passive is more restricted in collocations and is likely to

co-occur with verbs referring to daily activities and informal expressions (based on BNCdemo)

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

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

– These verbs are rarely found among the top 100 collocations for the be-passive in BNCdemo

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Passives in English (9)

Variations across text categories– Be-passives are over 8 times as

frequent in FLOB as in BNCdemo Text categories A-J typically show

higher proportions of be- passives than K-R

In written genres, official documents (H) and academic prose (J) show exceptionally high proportions of be-passives

Biber’s (1988) MDA: be-passives (long and short) positively weighted on D5 (abstract vs. non-abstract information)

– Get passives typically occur in colloquial and informal genres

Get-passives are over 5 times as frequent in BNCdemo as in FLOB

In writing, skills/trades/hobbies (E) and humour (R) show exceptionally high proportions of get-passives

be-passive

get-passive

Passive type

AB

CD

EF

GH

JK

LM

NP

RS

Genre

0.00

10.00

20.00

Per

cen

t

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Passives in English (10)

Syntactic functions– Finite vs. non-finite positions

Finite: predicate Non-finite: adjectival, adverbial, complement, object, subject

– English passives are by far the most frequent in the predicate position

97% for be-passives and 96% for get-passives– Non-finite forms

relatively common in object and complement positions Rare in the subject position

– The distribution of get-passives across syntactic functions is more balanced than that of be-passives

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Passives in Chinese (1)

Syntactic vs. lexical passives– Syntactic passives

bei: most frequent and ‘universal’ passive marker gei, jiao, rang: not fully grammaticalised, colloquial and

dialectal Wei(-agent-)suo: archaic and typically found in formal

written genres

– Lexical passives: ai, shou, zao Lexical meanings are inherently passive

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Passives in Chinese (2)

Long vs. short passives– Bei and gei are found in both long (40%, 43%) and short (60%,

57%) passives– Wei(-agent-)suo, jiao and rang only occur in long passives– Shou and zao are more frequent in short (68%, 63%) than long

(32%, 37%) passives– Ai typically occurs in short passives (97%)– In lexical passives, the agent NPs can be systematically

interpreted as attributive modifiers of nominalised verbs, but they cannot in syntactic passives

– Long passives tend to be used in speech and colloquial genres while short passives are found in typical written genres such as academic prose (J), official documents (H) and biographies (G)

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Passives in Chinese (3)

Syntactic functions– Most frequent in the predicate position

76% for syntactic passives (bei 74%); 75% for lexical passives

– Non-predicate positions: attributive, adverbial, nominal, object, subject

The attributive use is the second most important syntactic function (14%)

Rare in the subject position Not found as a complement

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Passives in Chinese (4)

Interaction between passives and aspect– Chinese passives are closely allied with aspect

syntactic passives convey an aspectual meaning of result– Bare passives account for the largest proportions for

syntactic (40%) and lexical (78%) passives– Perfective -le is frequent in both syntactic (17%) and lexical

(11%) passives– RVCs and resultative de-structure are more common in

syntactic passives while bare forms are more frequent in lexical passives

– Bare verbs are uncommon in syntactic passives, especially when the passive constructions function as predicates

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Passives in Chinese (5)

Semantic properties– Chinese passives are “usually of unfavourable meanings” (Chao

1968: 703) Prototypical passive marker bei derived from its main verb usage,

meaning ‘suffer’ (Wang 1957) However, under the influence of Western languages, passives are no

longer restricted to verbs with an inflictive meaning in Chinese– Proportions of negative semantic prosodies

Syntactic: gei (68%), rang (67%), bei (52%), jiao (50%), wei…suo (19%)

Lexical: ai (100%), zao (100%), shou (65%)– Collocations of bei-passives

51% negative, 39% neutral, 10% positive

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Passives in Chinese (6)

Variations across text categories– Passives are 11 times as frequent in writing than in speech– In writing, passives are most frequent in religious texts (D) and

mystery/detective stories (L), but least common in news editorials (C) and official documents (H)

Unlike English, Chinese passives are rare in official documents (H) and academic prose (J)

– Be-passives function to mark objectivity and a formal style but Chinese passives do not have this function

– Bei-passives The contrast in proportions between long and short forms is typically

less marked in 5 types of fiction, humour and speech More frequently negative in news editorials (C), mystery/detective

stories (L) and adventure stories (N); predominantly negative in speech; but rarely negative in official documents (H) and academic prose (J)

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Contrast (1): Frequencies

Passives are nearly 10 times as frequent in English as in Chinese

– Be-passives can be used for both stative and dynamic situations whereas Chinese passives can only occur in dynamic events

– Chinese passives typically have a negative semantic prosody while English passives (especially be-passives) do not

– English has a tendency to overuse passives, especially in formal writing (Quirk 1968; Baker 1985) whereas Chinese tends to avoid syntactic passives wherever possible ()

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Contrast (2): Long vs. short forms

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

Short passives are predominant in English while long passives are much more common in Chinese

– Passives are used in English to avoid mentioning the agent– The agent must normally be spelt out in Chinese passives

But this constraint has become more relaxed nowadays When it is difficult to spell out the agent

– Passives are used in English– A vague expression such as ren ‘someone’ and renmen

‘people’ is often specified instead of using passives in Chinese

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Contrast (3): Semantic properties

Chinese passives are more frequently used with an inflictive meaning than English passives

– Chinese passives were used at early stages primarily for unpleasant or undesirable events; but the semantic constraint on the use of passives has become more relaxed, especially in writing

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

– Proportions of meaning categories English: neutral > negative > positive Chinese: negative > neutral > positive

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Contrast (4): Syntactic functions

As a verb construction, the passive is most frequently used in the predicate position in both English and Chinese

The proportion of passives used as predicates in English (over 95%) is much higher than that in Chinese (76% on average)

Passives are more frequent in the object than subject position in both languages

Passives often function as attributive modifiers in Chinese but as complements in English

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

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

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Contrast (5): Genre variations

Be-passives occur more frequently in informative than imaginative text categories while get-passives are most commonly found in colloquial genres and informal written genres

– Official documents (H) and academic prose (J) show very high proportions of passives in English, but have the lowest proportions of passives in Chinese

In Chinese, wei…suo typically occurs in formal written genres and jiao, rang and gei in colloquial genres

Mystery/detective stories (L) and religious writing (D) show exceptionally high proportions of passives in Chinese

– 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

The difference in the overall distribution of passives is closely associated with the different functions of passives in the two languages

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

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Conclusions

Passive constructions express a basic passive meaning in English and Chinese, but they also show a range of differences

These differences are associated with their different functions in the two languages

Comparable monolingual corpora provide a useful tool for contrastive linguistics