PART ONE: INTRODUCTION 1. Rationale Passive sentences are typical structures in Indo-European languages. A lot of research about the passive phenomenon has been done, providing a wide variety of features of passive structures cross-linguistically (e. Keenan, 1976; Freidin, 1975; Permutter, 1978; Zaenen, 1983; Langacker, 1990; Tomlin, 1995.) Each school of linguistics has displayed its own ways of analyzing the passive structures, thus posing trouble for learners and for novice researchers in settling a standpoint in grasping and understanding the fundamental semantic and syntactic structure of this phenomenon in languages.
The following example illustrates this point. Sentences (a) and (b) below describe a state in which a male person carries a box from one place to another: (a) He moved the box into the room. (b) The box was moved into the room (by him.) Both sentences, (a) and (b), refer to one event with the same actor. Syntactically, sentence (a) differs from sentence (b) in that the subject/doer in (b) is optional or left out entirely, or optionally expressed obliquely via a by-phrase, and that the object in (a) serves as the subject/patient in (b.) Traditional grammar treats passive voice as the change of the morphology in verbs, with the inversion of the subject and object of the sentences.
It has been argued in transformational grammar that passive sentences derive from a D-structure form of so-called active sentences. It is the NP-MOVEMENT (c. Radford, 1988:420) that brings to life passive sentences. Generative grammar 1 z offers an analysis of the change from active to passive structures, attributing the shift through a „multilevel syntagmatic structure‟ in which the „deep structure (or initial stratum) is basically active in organization‟ (Langacker, 1990.) Passive structures are also argued to belong to a class of expression known as idioms chunks (c.) And NPs in passive sentences do not have the same syntactic freedom of distribution as other NPs.
Another argument is formulated in relation to thematic relations. It is claimed that active Objects (i. Objects of active sentences) play the same thematic role as the corresponding passive Subjects. Another view on passive voice comes from Functionalism.
Functional grammar divides passive structure into three subcategories, depending on the functions that the speakers would like to convey. It is called the pragmatic function of the sentence. For example, when the Agent of the action is unknown to the writers or speakers, passive structures are preferred. Or when the focus of the sentence is the action and the effects of the action, not the doer of the action, passive constructions are applied (c.
Halliday, 1994; Lock, 1996; Downing and Locke, 1992; Givon, 1995.) Semantically, a functional grammarian analyzes constituents in passive grammar based on the functions of the participants in the sentence, namely actor / agent, goal, beneficiary, recipient, etc. Previously mentioned views of linguistics on passive voice have left drawbacks to language users and language teachers. For instance, traditional grammar states that passive voice can be formed if the verb is a transitive one, i. the verb having a direct object.
However, not all transitive verbs can be conjured up in passive structures. Or as stated by generative grammar, passive structures derive from their active counterparts. In reality, no speaker describes an event by forming an active sentence in his/her mind then „transforms‟ it into passives. This will be further discussed later in the study.
2 z It is not until recently that cognitive semantics (or more generally cognitive linguistics) has postulated a different look at language structures. The focus in the study of language shifts from external to internal, mentalist aspects of the human language. Researchers in cognitive science argue that the linguistic structure is a direct reflex of cognition in the sense that a particular linguistic expression is associated with particular ways of conceptualizing a given situation (Lee, 2001: 1). They believe that there exists an interrelationship between thought and meaning.
It is from this point of view that passive sentences are seen from a different angle. The root of the differences mentioned above originates from the theory of meaning. Generative grammar claims that the structure of linguistic expressions is determined by a formal rule system that is largely independent of meaning.