Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - Passive constructions in English and Chinese
T2 - a corpus-based contrastive study
AU - Xiao, Richard
AU - McEnery, Tony
AU - Qian, Yufang
PY - 2006
Y1 - 2006
N2 - This article combines the corpus-based and contrastive approaches, seeking to provide a systematic account of passive constructions in two typologically distinct languages, namely British English and Mandarin Chinese. We will first explore, on the basis of written and spoken corpus data, a range of characteristics of passives in the two languages including various passive constructions, long vs. short passives, semantic, pragmatic and syntactic features as well as genre variations. On the basis of this exploration, passive constructions in the two languages are contrasted in a structured way. Methodologically, this study demonstrates that comparable monolingual corpora can be exploited fruitfully in contrastive linguistics.
AB - This article combines the corpus-based and contrastive approaches, seeking to provide a systematic account of passive constructions in two typologically distinct languages, namely British English and Mandarin Chinese. We will first explore, on the basis of written and spoken corpus data, a range of characteristics of passives in the two languages including various passive constructions, long vs. short passives, semantic, pragmatic and syntactic features as well as genre variations. On the basis of this exploration, passive constructions in the two languages are contrasted in a structured way. Methodologically, this study demonstrates that comparable monolingual corpora can be exploited fruitfully in contrastive linguistics.
KW - Chinese/English
KW - genre
KW - passive
U2 - 10.1075/lic.6.1.05xia
DO - 10.1075/lic.6.1.05xia
M3 - Journal article
VL - 6
SP - 109
EP - 149
JO - Languages in Contrast
JF - Languages in Contrast
SN - 1569-9897
IS - 1
ER -