Wednesday 2 May 2012

The passive voice of Chinese sentences


中文被动句

Dr Youxuan Wang  (王友)

First draft: 2011-03-12
Second draft: 2012-05-02

The passive voice in modern Chinese should not pose any special difficulty to students whose first language is English. Most of the scenarios that would evoke the use of passive voice in English would also call for the construction of passive sentences in Chinese. However, there are a few grammatical and stylistic idiosyncrasies in modern Chinese that merit the student’s attention.

  • The Chinese language is not overtly inflected in the sense that the form of a character does not undergo any modification in order to reflect number, tense or voice. Therefore, the verb used in a passive sentence would still look the same as if it is used in active voice. This makes the student’s life a lot easier.
  • However, the word order in a language like Chinese is very significant. The passive voice is often expressed by a “”-prepositional phrase which functions as adverbial. Unlike English, Chinese adverbs are to be placed before the verbs that they modify. (By contrast the “by”-prepositional phrase in an English passive sentence usually appears after the verb. Be aware of this difference!)
  • Moreover, the preposition “” can be interchanged with some synonyms in some contexts. (By contrast, the “by” in the same contexts does not have corresponding synonyms.) Even more idiosyncratic is the fact that, in many cases, the noun phrase following the preposition “” and the even the entire “”-prepositional phrase can be (often preferably) omitted.

In what follows, we will consider all these grammatical and stylistic features by looking at some authentic sentence examples. For ease of syntactic analysis, we will mark up the different constituents of a sentence in red. For a legend of the conventional mark-up symbols, please go to the article “How Chinese Grammarians Mark up Sentence Constituents (句子成分的标识方法)” (URL: <http://intensive-chinese.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/marking-up-sentence-constituents.html>) or click here.

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