A corpus-based functional analysis of the bei-construction in Chinese written discourse: A study with special reference to the be-passive in English.

摘要

This dissertation is a corpus-based analysis of the bei-construction in Chinese written discourse with special reference to the English passive. It provides both quantitative and qualitative analyses of the distributions and discourse functions of the bei -construction and the English passive with respect to the parameters of patient affectedness, sense of adversity, old vs. new NP status, agency and the humanness of the patient and agent within and across a large variety of genres, registers and text types from the one-million word English FROWN corpus and the corresponding one-million word Chinese LCMC corpus.;I propose a unitary functional analysis of the bei-construction in that the use of the bei-construction is motivated by the cognitive role prominence of the patient NP referent in a situation. Values for the semantic, pragmatic and discourse factors listed above contribute to the role prominence required for use of the bei-construction. Syntactically, the patient and agent NPs (when an agent NP is present) are in marked positions, which makes them both textually salient and highlights their respective patient and agent properties, in contrast to the unmarked order. In agentless structures, the patient property is even more prominent.;How the bei-construction compares to the English passive semantically and functionally is also explored. It is argued that the two constructions share the function of expressing role prominence of the referent of the patient NP, but they differ in the extent to which particular pragmatic factors contribute to that role prominence. In Chinese, the bei-construction is relatively more strongly associated with the expression of personal emotional attitude than with objective management of information flow. The English be-passive, in contrast, is used relatively more frequently than the bei-construction is in Chinese for objective discourse flow considerations.