Abstract and Key Words

Abstract: With the rapid development of the international communication, more and more foreigners study Chinese and more and more Chinese people learn English. As an important syntactic form in both English and Chinese, passive is a hot topic in linguistics. This thesis intends to make a contrastive study of English and Chinese passive sentences by definition and constructions. Then this thesis enumerates the differences of these two kinds of English and Chinese passive in structure, context and semantic features separately with proper examples. This thesis aims to discover the differences and the underlying principles between English and Chinese passive in order to enable language learners to make fewer mistakes in this aspect and stimulate learners’ interesting in knowledge explorations.

Key words: English; Chinese; passive; contrast

摘要：随着国际交流的飞速发展，越来越多的外国人学习汉语，而越来越多的中国人学习英语。被动句作为英汉语中一种重要的句式，一直是语言学的研究热点。本论文通过从定义和句式形式的角度对比研究英汉被动句。然后论文分别列举了英汉这两种被动句在结构、使用语境和语义特点的不同点，并举例对比分析。本论文旨在发现英汉被动句的差异和其运行规则来帮助语言学习者减少这方面的错误和培养他们知识探索的兴趣。

关键词：英语、汉语、被动句、对比

1. Introduction
As one of the key structures in most of the languages in this world, passive, though with different titles like passive voice in English but passive sentence in Chinese, exerts a profound effect on the mastery of grammar as well as foreign language teaching and learning. It is necessary for us to know the definition of the voice, before we do the study of the passive constructions. As we all know, voice, a form of verbs, is a linguistic device with the grammatical category which makes it possible in either of the two ways, active or passive, without change in the facts reported. Pence and Emery provided us with a clearer definition, “ Voice is that property of a verb which makes clear whether the subject of the verb performs the action or receives the action described by the verb. If the subject performs the action (or is in the state or condition) described by the verb, the verb is said to be in the active voice. If the subject receives the action, the verb is said to be in the passive voice….” Dai Haoyi pointed out –in English, we observe the passive from the view of the agent, but in Chinese the object; that is, English cares more about who is doing the thing, while Chinese cares more about what happened.
Confronting the study of the passive constructions which are not corresponding at English and Chinese, Chinese students as foreign language learners often puzzle over how to use the passive voice in English properly. Therefore, during learning and using passive voice, students should consider the passive construction both in English and Chinese, as well as the difference like structure, grammatical form, context and semantic features in them.