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Abstract:
The passive voice is a common grammatical phenomenon in English. Most Chinese experts used to study its forms of structure and make comparisons between Chinese and English. However, the passive voice expresses the speakers’ certain attitude or feelings toward an event or the result caused by the event, and my mini-thesis argues that from a different point of view, the passive voice has some pragmatic functions to show different feelings and meanings. By analyzing these functions, this essay can help English learners further understand the passive voice and use it more skillfully.
Key words: pragmatic function; passive voice; active voice; intention
The passive voice is a common grammatical phenomenon in English. Most Chinese experts used to study its forms of structure and make comparisons between Chinese and English. Tan Weiguo and Tang Ruping believe that the forms of structure consist of the formal passive sentence and the active sentence with passive connotations. From a different point of view, Wang Huan and Wang Lei manage to discover similarities and differences between the passive voice in Chinese and English by analyzing the connotations of Chinese and English passive voices. As for functions, the distinguished linguist F. R. Palmer expresses the following opinion: “The passive is used when the ‘agent’, the subject of the active verb, is unknown or unspecified. For this reason, it is very common in scientific writing, especially in reports on research, for the work may be described impersonally without indicating who did it.”
Generally speaking, traditional English teaching focuses on the mechanical training of transformation of the passive voice and the active voice. However, little was done on the purpose and functions of the passive voice. This paper suggests that we must move beyond the structure and general functions of the passive voice and study it from a new angle -- pragmatics. Pragmatics is the study of speaker’s intentional meaning in context. In this essay I will analyze functions of the passive voice from a pragmatic perspective to help English learners further understand it and use it more skillfully.
The reasons why this topic has been chosen are as follows. It is different from what has been done traditionally. This paper studies the passive voice from the pragmatic perspective. Traditionally, the passive, as a sentence pattern, has always been studied statically at the syntactic level. However, it is generally recognized that language is a communicative tool, and therefore, from a practical point of view, it should be studied within a context. In language communication, it is the communicator’s pragmatic intention that decides which sentence pattern should be chosen. To be more specific, a sentence pattern, here the passive voice, needs to be studied from a pragmatic perspective. In a word, only by applying the pragmatic theories to the passive voice, can the functions of the passive voice be studied more completely and more practically.
Although scholars have made considerable contribution to the study on the passive construction through their research, it seems that some of them just state their opinions on the passive construction and enumerate the reasons for using the passive or some functions of this construction without deep explanation. In addition, when they talk about the functions, they do it mainly by using the information structure theory. Geoffrey Leech and Jan Svartvik share the following opinion：“The passive is especially associated with impersonal style, a variety of English which they define as one in which the speaker does not refer directly to himself of his readers, but avoids the pronouns I, you, we.” However, the passive expresses the speakers’ certain attitude or feeling toward an event or the result caused by the event. The passive construction, with the changes of the speaker’s psychological activities, shows different feelings and meanings, resulting in various methods of expressing meaning. Therefore, to make up for limitations of previous research, this essay will also study the passive voice, but from a different point of view. This mini-thesis will analyze functions of the passive voice from a pragmatic perspective to help English learners further understand it and use it more skillfully.
The passive voice observes the politeness principle to keep the discourse appropriate. The distinguished scholar Leech locates politeness among what he calls interpersonal rhetoric, that is, the speaker’s social goals rather than his illocutionary goals. He enlarges the Co-operative Principle by adding Politeness Principle (PP) to it. PP can help us understand why the speaker chooses this content and form of speech, and they never work in isolation. PP maintains the social equilibrium and the friendly relations which enable us to assume that our interlocutors are being cooperative in the first place. According to the Tact maxim in PP, when a speaker is proposing something that is potentially costly to the hearer, he should try to minimize hearer cost. Since the content of what the speaker wants to propose is fixed, the speaker needs to minimize the physical imposition on the hearer. There are many ways to do it and the passive voice is one of ways to propose something indirectly. For instance, when asking someone else to wash the dishes, people should not use ‘you must wash up the dishes’ but ‘the dishes must be washed up.’
After the speaker chooses a politeness level appropriate to the context, he needs to choose an appropriate linguistic form to convey his intention. In daily communication, people tend to express their purposes in an indirect way. In other words, the speaker doesn’t say what he wants to say directly; instead, he expresses his purpose with another speech act. Sometimes the speaker realizes his illocutionary act by using the passive voice. For example, when the speaker wants to ask others to attend a meeting, sometimes he says ‘All members of the club are requested to attend the annual meeting.’ In the context, it is a request for the hearer to attend the meeting. However, the speech act it performs is just a declaration. There are two levels of implications in it: “I request all members of the club to attend the annual meeting.” and “all members of the club must attend the annual meeting.”
When talking about functions of the passive voice, linguists always use this sentence “Mistakes were made” to satire politicians who play on language skills by choosing the passive voice to omit the agent of the action so as to evade the responsibility. The passive sentence “Mistakes were made by me” is the weak form of the active one “I made mistakes” and in the agentless passive sentence “Mistakes were made”, the agent ‘I’ is nulled. The speaker’s intention here is that he has to admit mistakes he has made and tries to conceal them at the same time. In this case, only the passive voice can realize the speaker’s intention. In fact, such examples also can be found in daily communication among ordinary people. For example, a child who did something wrong said to his mother: “Mommy, the puppy was killed,” instead of “I killed the puppy.” By choosing this sentence pattern intentionally to omit the agent ‘I’, the child wants to escape from his mother’s criticism.
In the former case, the speaker chooses the agentless passive sentence to protect himself from being criticized. In the following sentence, the speaker manages to conceal the agent of action on purpose by using agentless passive sentence and the agent may not be the speaker himself, and may be someone else or some people including the speaker. For example, in the sentence “We had meant to report on this problem but the data was inadvertently deleted from our files”, the active voice is used in the first half of this sentence and passive in the second half. If this sentence is kept cohesive, the voice of the second half should follow the first and “we” should be used as the subject of the second half. But the speaker changes the voice by introducing the new information “the data” as the subject and omitting the agent of action. No one knows who deleted the data (is the agent of action), but judging from this sentence pattern, we can deduce that the speaker tries to conceal the agent of action—himself or others with a special sentence which consists of two subjects and voices.
The passive voice also emphasizes the agent of the action, for the by-phrase at the end of the construction offers a vast space for the agent. That is to say, the agent may be much weightier than the subject (the patient) by involving coordination, apposition, non-finite or finite post-modification. Palmer also agrees that the passive construction is to some degree a device for placing long (and weighty) agents in final position. Besides, from lighter to weightier and from simpler to more complicated are the general trends when people deal with information processing. As Chen Zhong says, according to physiological studies, when receiving information, people are used to accepting and understanding it by means of given-> new, or simple -> complex. The following examples show how the passive construction emphasizes the agent.
Historians have been puzzled by dots, lines and symbols which have been engraved on walls, bones and he ivory trunks of mammoths.
Profitability will be depressed by weak demand at home and abroad, by worsening competitiveness and increasing cost pressures.
In these examples, the agents are heavier than the patients. Though the information expressed in the active construction and the passive is the same, it is difficult to impress the readers if the active sentence begins with a long and complicated phrase. The active sentence may give the readers an impression of top-heavy and imbalance.
The passive construction cannot only emphasize the agent of the action, but can also realize the thematic prominence and end-focus at the same time. The passive construction restructures the normal order of the agent and the patient and deliberately puts the patient at the position of the subject; hence, it has the function of thematic prominence. At the same time, the passive construction puts the agent at the end of a sentence and thus achieves the realization of agent focusing. As a result, the passive construction realizes double effects: thematic prominence as well as end-focus. Take the following passage as an example:
His intellectual gifts, his moral perceptions, his power of experiencing and communicating emotion, were kept in a state of preternatural activity by the prick and anguish of his daily life.
A passive construction is used here with the patient as the subject and the agent at the end of the sentence. Therefore, the passive construction gives prominence to the good qualities that made Dimmesdale succeed: his intellectual gifts, his moral perceptions, his power of experiencing and communicating emotion. At the same time, by using the passive construction, the subject of the alternative active form is put at the end of the sentence and becomes the end-focus, and this further emphasizes ‘the prick and anguish of his daily life’. As a result, the author successfully makes full use of the two most important positions of the sentence: the initial position and the final position, and stresses tactically both Dimmesdale’s personal qualities and the suffering he was experiencing.
The passive construction, by changing the positions of the agent and the patient in the alternative active construction, cannot only realize the thematic prominence and end-focus, but it can also make the text develop more cohesively and then more coherently. Take the following sentences as examples.
If so, the limit is a long way ahead, but it can be made out, just barely, through the haze over the road.
I have seen, I believe, all of the most unlovely towns of the world; they are all to be found in the United States.
In these two sentences, passive voices ‘be made out’ and ‘are to be found’ are used in the second clause respectively. The patients of the action ‘it’ and ‘they’ are given information and repetition of the new information ‘the limit’ and ‘the most unlovely towns of the world’ in the former clauses. By doing so, Transition from the given to new information and structural cohesion are realized and the whole sentence develops coherently.
The passive construction is, in a sense, the inverted form of the corresponding active construction. Compared with the active, the passive construction has been studied a lot by scholars from different angles. And when they did the studies, seldom did they study the passive voice from a pragmatic perspective. This essay studies the passive voice from a pragmatic perspective and has discovered that the passive voice does have some pragmatic functions to show different feelings and meanings. This paper suggests that further study be carried out on comparison of pragmatic functions of the passive voice between English and Chinese.
Bibliography:
［1］Chen Zhong. Information Pragmatics ［M］ Jinan: Shandong Education Press, 1999.
［2］He Ziran. Contemporary Pragmatics ［M］ Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2004.
［3］He Ziran. Pragmatics and English Learning［M］ Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press, 1997.
［4］Leech, G. & J. Svartvik. A Communicative Grammar of English ［M］ New York: Longman Group Limited, 1975.
［5］Lian Shuneng, A Comparative Study of English and Chinese ［M］ Beijing: Higher Education Press, 1993.
［6］Palmer, F.R. Semantics (2nd edition) ［M］ Cambridge: Cambridge Uni. Press, 1981.
［7］Verschueren, J. Understanding Pragmatics［M］ London: Arnold, the Hodder Headline Group, 1999
The passive voice is a common grammatical phenomenon in English. Most Chinese experts used to study its forms of structure and make comparisons between Chinese and English. However, the passive voice expresses the speakers’ certain attitude or feelings toward an event or the result caused by the event, and my mini-thesis argues that from a different point of view, the passive voice has some pragmatic functions to show different feelings and meanings. By analyzing these functions, this essay can help English learners further understand the passive voice and use it more skillfully.
Key words: pragmatic function; passive voice; active voice; intention
The passive voice is a common grammatical phenomenon in English. Most Chinese experts used to study its forms of structure and make comparisons between Chinese and English. Tan Weiguo and Tang Ruping believe that the forms of structure consist of the formal passive sentence and the active sentence with passive connotations. From a different point of view, Wang Huan and Wang Lei manage to discover similarities and differences between the passive voice in Chinese and English by analyzing the connotations of Chinese and English passive voices. As for functions, the distinguished linguist F. R. Palmer expresses the following opinion: “The passive is used when the ‘agent’, the subject of the active verb, is unknown or unspecified. For this reason, it is very common in scientific writing, especially in reports on research, for the work may be described impersonally without indicating who did it.”
Generally speaking, traditional English teaching focuses on the mechanical training of transformation of the passive voice and the active voice. However, little was done on the purpose and functions of the passive voice. This paper suggests that we must move beyond the structure and general functions of the passive voice and study it from a new angle -- pragmatics. Pragmatics is the study of speaker’s intentional meaning in context. In this essay I will analyze functions of the passive voice from a pragmatic perspective to help English learners further understand it and use it more skillfully.
The reasons why this topic has been chosen are as follows. It is different from what has been done traditionally. This paper studies the passive voice from the pragmatic perspective. Traditionally, the passive, as a sentence pattern, has always been studied statically at the syntactic level. However, it is generally recognized that language is a communicative tool, and therefore, from a practical point of view, it should be studied within a context. In language communication, it is the communicator’s pragmatic intention that decides which sentence pattern should be chosen. To be more specific, a sentence pattern, here the passive voice, needs to be studied from a pragmatic perspective. In a word, only by applying the pragmatic theories to the passive voice, can the functions of the passive voice be studied more completely and more practically.
Although scholars have made considerable contribution to the study on the passive construction through their research, it seems that some of them just state their opinions on the passive construction and enumerate the reasons for using the passive or some functions of this construction without deep explanation. In addition, when they talk about the functions, they do it mainly by using the information structure theory. Geoffrey Leech and Jan Svartvik share the following opinion：“The passive is especially associated with impersonal style, a variety of English which they define as one in which the speaker does not refer directly to himself of his readers, but avoids the pronouns I, you, we.” However, the passive expresses the speakers’ certain attitude or feeling toward an event or the result caused by the event. The passive construction, with the changes of the speaker’s psychological activities, shows different feelings and meanings, resulting in various methods of expressing meaning. Therefore, to make up for limitations of previous research, this essay will also study the passive voice, but from a different point of view. This mini-thesis will analyze functions of the passive voice from a pragmatic perspective to help English learners further understand it and use it more skillfully.
The passive voice observes the politeness principle to keep the discourse appropriate. The distinguished scholar Leech locates politeness among what he calls interpersonal rhetoric, that is, the speaker’s social goals rather than his illocutionary goals. He enlarges the Co-operative Principle by adding Politeness Principle (PP) to it. PP can help us understand why the speaker chooses this content and form of speech, and they never work in isolation. PP maintains the social equilibrium and the friendly relations which enable us to assume that our interlocutors are being cooperative in the first place. According to the Tact maxim in PP, when a speaker is proposing something that is potentially costly to the hearer, he should try to minimize hearer cost. Since the content of what the speaker wants to propose is fixed, the speaker needs to minimize the physical imposition on the hearer. There are many ways to do it and the passive voice is one of ways to propose something indirectly. For instance, when asking someone else to wash the dishes, people should not use ‘you must wash up the dishes’ but ‘the dishes must be washed up.’
After the speaker chooses a politeness level appropriate to the context, he needs to choose an appropriate linguistic form to convey his intention. In daily communication, people tend to express their purposes in an indirect way. In other words, the speaker doesn’t say what he wants to say directly; instead, he expresses his purpose with another speech act. Sometimes the speaker realizes his illocutionary act by using the passive voice. For example, when the speaker wants to ask others to attend a meeting, sometimes he says ‘All members of the club are requested to attend the annual meeting.’ In the context, it is a request for the hearer to attend the meeting. However, the speech act it performs is just a declaration. There are two levels of implications in it: “I request all members of the club to attend the annual meeting.” and “all members of the club must attend the annual meeting.”
When talking about functions of the passive voice, linguists always use this sentence “Mistakes were made” to satire politicians who play on language skills by choosing the passive voice to omit the agent of the action so as to evade the responsibility. The passive sentence “Mistakes were made by me” is the weak form of the active one “I made mistakes” and in the agentless passive sentence “Mistakes were made”, the agent ‘I’ is nulled. The speaker’s intention here is that he has to admit mistakes he has made and tries to conceal them at the same time. In this case, only the passive voice can realize the speaker’s intention. In fact, such examples also can be found in daily communication among ordinary people. For example, a child who did something wrong said to his mother: “Mommy, the puppy was killed,” instead of “I killed the puppy.” By choosing this sentence pattern intentionally to omit the agent ‘I’, the child wants to escape from his mother’s criticism.
In the former case, the speaker chooses the agentless passive sentence to protect himself from being criticized. In the following sentence, the speaker manages to conceal the agent of action on purpose by using agentless passive sentence and the agent may not be the speaker himself, and may be someone else or some people including the speaker. For example, in the sentence “We had meant to report on this problem but the data was inadvertently deleted from our files”, the active voice is used in the first half of this sentence and passive in the second half. If this sentence is kept cohesive, the voice of the second half should follow the first and “we” should be used as the subject of the second half. But the speaker changes the voice by introducing the new information “the data” as the subject and omitting the agent of action. No one knows who deleted the data (is the agent of action), but judging from this sentence pattern, we can deduce that the speaker tries to conceal the agent of action—himself or others with a special sentence which consists of two subjects and voices.
The passive voice also emphasizes the agent of the action, for the by-phrase at the end of the construction offers a vast space for the agent. That is to say, the agent may be much weightier than the subject (the patient) by involving coordination, apposition, non-finite or finite post-modification. Palmer also agrees that the passive construction is to some degree a device for placing long (and weighty) agents in final position. Besides, from lighter to weightier and from simpler to more complicated are the general trends when people deal with information processing. As Chen Zhong says, according to physiological studies, when receiving information, people are used to accepting and understanding it by means of given-> new, or simple -> complex. The following examples show how the passive construction emphasizes the agent.
Historians have been puzzled by dots, lines and symbols which have been engraved on walls, bones and he ivory trunks of mammoths.
Profitability will be depressed by weak demand at home and abroad, by worsening competitiveness and increasing cost pressures.
In these examples, the agents are heavier than the patients. Though the information expressed in the active construction and the passive is the same, it is difficult to impress the readers if the active sentence begins with a long and complicated phrase. The active sentence may give the readers an impression of top-heavy and imbalance.
The passive construction cannot only emphasize the agent of the action, but can also realize the thematic prominence and end-focus at the same time. The passive construction restructures the normal order of the agent and the patient and deliberately puts the patient at the position of the subject; hence, it has the function of thematic prominence. At the same time, the passive construction puts the agent at the end of a sentence and thus achieves the realization of agent focusing. As a result, the passive construction realizes double effects: thematic prominence as well as end-focus. Take the following passage as an example:
His intellectual gifts, his moral perceptions, his power of experiencing and communicating emotion, were kept in a state of preternatural activity by the prick and anguish of his daily life.
A passive construction is used here with the patient as the subject and the agent at the end of the sentence. Therefore, the passive construction gives prominence to the good qualities that made Dimmesdale succeed: his intellectual gifts, his moral perceptions, his power of experiencing and communicating emotion. At the same time, by using the passive construction, the subject of the alternative active form is put at the end of the sentence and becomes the end-focus, and this further emphasizes ‘the prick and anguish of his daily life’. As a result, the author successfully makes full use of the two most important positions of the sentence: the initial position and the final position, and stresses tactically both Dimmesdale’s personal qualities and the suffering he was experiencing.
The passive construction, by changing the positions of the agent and the patient in the alternative active construction, cannot only realize the thematic prominence and end-focus, but it can also make the text develop more cohesively and then more coherently. Take the following sentences as examples.
If so, the limit is a long way ahead, but it can be made out, just barely, through the haze over the road.
I have seen, I believe, all of the most unlovely towns of the world; they are all to be found in the United States.
In these two sentences, passive voices ‘be made out’ and ‘are to be found’ are used in the second clause respectively. The patients of the action ‘it’ and ‘they’ are given information and repetition of the new information ‘the limit’ and ‘the most unlovely towns of the world’ in the former clauses. By doing so, Transition from the given to new information and structural cohesion are realized and the whole sentence develops coherently.
The passive construction is, in a sense, the inverted form of the corresponding active construction. Compared with the active, the passive construction has been studied a lot by scholars from different angles. And when they did the studies, seldom did they study the passive voice from a pragmatic perspective. This essay studies the passive voice from a pragmatic perspective and has discovered that the passive voice does have some pragmatic functions to show different feelings and meanings. This paper suggests that further study be carried out on comparison of pragmatic functions of the passive voice between English and Chinese.
Bibliography:
［1］Chen Zhong. Information Pragmatics ［M］ Jinan: Shandong Education Press, 1999.
［2］He Ziran. Contemporary Pragmatics ［M］ Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2004.
［3］He Ziran. Pragmatics and English Learning［M］ Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press, 1997.
［4］Leech, G. & J. Svartvik. A Communicative Grammar of English ［M］ New York: Longman Group Limited, 1975.
［5］Lian Shuneng, A Comparative Study of English and Chinese ［M］ Beijing: Higher Education Press, 1993.
［6］Palmer, F.R. Semantics (2nd edition) ［M］ Cambridge: Cambridge Uni. Press, 1981.
［7］Verschueren, J. Understanding Pragmatics［M］ London: Arnold, the Hodder Headline Group, 1999