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 -