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# A semantic analysis of passive, causative and dative constructions in Standard Chinese

Hilary Chappell

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Hilary Chappell. A semantic analysis of passive, causative and dative constructions in Standard Chinese. Humanities and Social Sciences. Australian National University, Canberra, 1984. English.

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Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
A SEMANTIC ANALYSIS

OF

PASSIVE, CAUSATIVE AND DATIVE CONSTRUCTIONS

IN STANDARD CHINESE

Hilary Margaret Chappell

A thesis submitted for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
of the
Australian National University

November 1983
Except where otherwise acknowledged
in the text, this thesis represents
the original research of the author.
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

PRÉCIS

EXPLANATORY NOTE ON THE USE OF THE TERM 'STANDARD
CHINESE'

LAYOUT OF LANGUAGE EXAMPLES

ABBREVIATIONS FOR THE GLOSSING OF GRAMMATICAL TERMS
AND MORPHEMES

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

I. THE TRADITIONAL ADVERSATIVE BEI PASSIVE

0 INTRODUCTION TO PART I 1

0.1 THE MOTIVATION FOR THE USE OF THE PASSIVE
IN CHINESE 5

0.2 A NOTE ON THE HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF
THE PASSIVE 15

1 THE SEMANTIC AND SYNTACTIC FEATURES OF THE _BEI_
PASSIVE IN GENERAL 18

1.1 ADVERSITY 18

1.1.1 Other Treatments of the Question of
Adversity 18

1.1.2 Semantic Analysis 22
a. Critique of the Verb Classification
Method 25

b. Critique of the Case Grammar
Approach 30

1.1.3 Imperatives and the Passive 34

1.2 THE SEMANTIC CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SUBJECT 39

1.3 COMPLETIVENESS 46

1.3.1 The Completive Aspect Marker _-le_ 47

1.3.2 The Durative Aspect Marker _-zhe_ 58

1.3.3 The Experiential Aspect Marker _-guo_ 61

1.3.4 Negation 62

1.3.5 Modal Verbs 65

1.4 VERB RESTRICTIONS OR THE 'DISPOSAL' NATURE
OF _BEI:_ A COUNTERARGUMENT 69

2 THE _BEI_ PASSIVE CONSTRUCTIONS 82

2.1 THE AGENT AND THE EUROPEANIZED PASSIVE 82

2.1.1 The Agentless Europeanized _Bei_ Passive 92

2.1.2 The Europeanized _Bei_ Passive with a
Collective Agent 92

2.2 THE TRADITIONAL ADVERSATIVE _BEI_ PASSIVES 96

2.2.1 The Adversative _Bei_ Passive with a
Person as the _Undergoer_ 97

2.2.2 The Adversative _Bei_ Passive of
Possessions 99

2.2.3 The Adversative _Bei_ Passive with a
Natural Force 103
3 THE ADVERSATIVE _BEI_ PASSIVE OF BODILY EFFECT 106

3.1 THE SYNTAX OF THE PASSIVE OF BODILY EFFECT 108

3.2 THE SYNTACTIC AND SEMANTIC DIFFERENTIATION OF THE PASSIVE OF BODILY EFFECT FROM THE REGULAR PASSIVE 120

3.3 THE SEMANTIC FIELD OF THE POSTVERBAL NOUN 127

3.3.1 Kinship 128

3.3.2 Material Possessions 134

a. Clothes being worn on the body 134

b. Other possessions 137

3.3.3 Name, Soul and Emotions 140

3.4 THE SEMANTIC NATURE OF THE EVENT ENCODED 148

3.4.1 Pleasant Events Affecting the Body 148

3.4.2 Good Health and Body Improvement 149

3.4.3 Neutral Events 151

3.5 SEMANTIC RESTRICTIONS ON THE DETERMINACY OF THE BODY PART TERM 154

3.6 THE SEMANTIC NATURE OF THE BODY PART TERM PERMISSIBLE 160

3.6.1 Parts of the Body versus Places or Areas on the Body 160

3.6.2 Internal Body Parts 163

4 THE _GET_ PASSIVE IN ENGLISH 169

4.1 _EARLIER_ ATTITUDES TO THE USE OF _GET_ 171

4.2 TWO UNUSUAL KINDS OF PASSIVE CONSTRUCTION 172

4.3 OTHER ANALYSES OF THE _GET_ PASSIVE 176

4.4 THE _GET_ PASSIVE IN _GENERAL_ 177

4.5 THE _GET_ PASSIVE CONSTRUCTIONS 184

4.5.1 'Adversative' _Get_ Passives with a Person as the _Undergoer_ 184

(i) The Non-Reflexive 'Adversative' _Get_ Passive 184

(ii) The Reflexive 'Adversative' _Get_ Passive 189

4.5.2 'Beneficial' _Get_ Passives with a Person as the _Undergoer_ 194

(i) The Non-Reflexive 'Beneficial' _Get_ Passive 194

(ii) The Reflexive 'Beneficial' _Get_ Passive 198

4.5.3 _Get_ Passives with an Inanimate Subject 200

(i) The 'Adversative' _Get_ Passive with an Inanimate Subject 200

(ii) The 'Beneficial' _Get_ Passive with an Inanimate Subject 202

CONCLUSION TO PART I 207

## II CAUSATIVE AND PASSIVE CONSTRUCTIONS FORMED BY RANG AND JIAO

0 INTRODUCTION TO CAUSATIVE CONSTRUCTIONS IN CHINESE 211

0.1 ARE RANG AND JIAO CAUSATIVES SERIAL VERB CONSTRUCTIONS? 212
0.2 CAUSATIVE CONSTRUCTIONS FORMED BY SHI 216

0.2.1 Comparison of Shi with Rang and Jiao 217

(i) Stative Shi Causative of Unintentional Causation 223

(ii) Stative Shi Causative of Agentless Causation 225

(iii) Shi Causative of Natural Phenomena 226

1 RANG CAUSATIVE CONSTRUCTIONS 229

1.1 RANG AS AN INDEPENDENT VERB 229

1.2 CAUSATIVE CONSTRUCTIONS FORMED BY RANG 231

1.2.1 Rang Speech Act Causatives 232

(i) Speech Act Causative of Request with Rang 232

(ii) Speech Act Causative of Permission with Rang 238

1.2.2 Rang Causatives of Non-Interference 243

(i) Rang Causative of Non-Interference in an Agentive Event 248

(ii) Rang Causative of Non-Interference in an Agentless Event 250

1.2.3 Rang Experiencer Causatives 253

(i) Experiencer Causative of Unintentional Causation with Rang 253

(ii) Experiencer Causative of Agentless Causation with Rang 256

2 JIAO CAUSATIVE CONSTRUCTIONS 263

2.1 JIAO AS AN INDEPENDENT VERB 263

2.2 CAUSATIVE CONSTRUCTIONS FORMED BY JIAO 264

2.2.1 Jiao Speech Act Causative 266

(i) Speech Act Causative of Command with Jiao 266

2.2.2 Jiao Experiencer Causatives 273

(i) Experiencer Causative of Unintentional Causation with Jiao 273

(ii) Experiencer Causative of Agentless Causation with Jiao 278

3 SYNTACTIC DIFFERENTIATION OF PASSIVE FROM CAUSATIVE CONSTRUCTIONS FORMED BY RANG AND JIAO 283

3.1 ASPECTUAL MARKING AND SERIAL VERB CONSTRUCTIONS 285

3.1.1 Verbal Aspect Constructions with Completive -le, Experiential -guo and Durative zhe 285

3.1.2 No Aspectual Marking 290

3.1.3 Inchoative Sentential le 290

3.1.4 Perfect Constructions -le...le and -guo...le 291
<table><tr><td>3.2</td><td>NEGATION</td><td>293</td></tr><tr><td>3.2.1</td><td>Causative Verb Negation</td><td>294</td></tr><tr><td>3.2.2</td><td>Main Verb Negation</td><td>297</td></tr><tr><td>3.3</td><td>MODAL VERBS</td><td>301</td></tr></table>

<table><tr><td>4</td><td>INTRODUCTION TO THE COLLOQUIAL PASSIVES IN CHINESE FORMED BY <u>RANG</u> AND <u>JIAO</u></td><td>304</td></tr></table>

<table><tr><td>5</td><td>THE COLLOQUIAL <u>RANG</u> PASSIVES</td><td>309</td></tr></table>

<table><tr><td>5.1</td><td>THE <u>RANG</u> PASSIVES OF "AVOIDABLE EVENTS"</td><td>309</td></tr><tr><td>(i)</td><td>The <u>RANG</u> Passive of Avoidability with a Person as the Undergoer</td><td>316</td></tr></table>

<table><tr><td>(ii)</td><td>The <u>RANG</u> Passive of Avoidability on the Part of an Adversely Affected Owner</td><td>317</td></tr></table>

<table><tr><td>5.2</td><td><u>RANG</u> VERSUS <u>BEI</u>: A SYNTACTIC AND SEMANTIC DIFFERENTIATION</td><td>321</td></tr></table>

<table><tr><td>6</td><td>THE COLLOQUIAL <u>JIAO</u> PASSIVES</td><td>329</td></tr></table>

<table><tr><td>6.1</td><td>THE <u>JIAO</u> PASSIVE OF "HOT NEWS"</td><td>329</td></tr></table>

<table><tr><td>6.2</td><td>THE SYNTACTIC DIFFERENTIATION OF THE <u>JIAO</u> PASSIVE FROM THE <u>RANG</u> AND <u>BEI</u> PASSIVES</td><td>330</td></tr></table>

<table><tr><td>6.3</td><td>THE SEMANTIC DIFFERENTIATION OF THE <u>JIAO</u> PASSIVE FROM THE <u>RANG</u> AND <u>BEI</u> PASSIVES</td><td>334</td></tr></table>

<table><tr><td>CONCLUSION TO PART II</td><td>345</td></tr></table>

### III DATIVE AND BENEFACTIVE CONSTRUCTIONS FORMED BY GEI

<table><tr><td>0</td><td>INTRODUCTION TO PART III</td><td>349</td></tr></table>

<table><tr><td>1</td><td>THE DATIVE CONSTRUCTION OF TRANSFERRAL WITH ENCLITIC GEI: S<sub>1</sub></td><td>361</td></tr></table>

<table><tr><td>1.1</td><td>SEMANTIC DESCRIPTION OF S<sub>1</sub></td><td>363</td></tr></table>

<table><tr><td>1.1.1</td><td>Presupposition of the Direct Object as being with the Subject</td><td>363</td></tr></table>

<table><tr><td>1.1.2</td><td>Verb Classes in S<sub>1</sub></td><td>364</td></tr></table>

<table><tr><td>1.1.3</td><td>The Completiveness and Causativity of S<sub>1</sub> with respect to 'Causing to Have'</td><td>369</td></tr></table>

<table><tr><td>2</td><td>THE DATIVE CONSTRUCTION OF INTENDED BENEFIT WITH POSTVERBAL GEI: S<sub>2</sub></td><td>372</td></tr></table>

<table><tr><td>2.1</td><td>SEMANTIC DESCRIPTION OF S<sub>2</sub></td><td>373</td></tr></table>

<table><tr><td>2.1.1</td><td>The Components of 'Usefulness' and 'Benefit'</td><td>373</td></tr></table>

<table><tr><td>2.1.2</td><td>No Presupposition of the Direct Object as being with the Subject</td><td>378</td></tr></table>

<table><tr><td>2.1.3</td><td>Verb Classes in S<sub>2</sub></td><td>379</td></tr></table>

<table><tr><td>2.1.4</td><td>Causativity versus Causative Intention: Causation of Having and Causation of Benefit</td><td>380</td></tr></table>
<table><thead><tr><th></th><th></th><th>Page</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>3</td><td>THE BENEFACTIVE CONSTRUCTION WITH PREVERBAL GEI: S<sub>3</sub></td><td>391</td></tr><tr><td>3.1</td><td>COMPARISON OF THE BENEFACTIVE GEI CONSTRUCTION WITH THE TI AND WEI CONSTRUCTIONS</td><td>396</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>3.1.1 The Ti Construction of Social Obligation</td><td>412</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>3.1.2 The Symbolic Wei Construction</td><td>413</td></tr><tr><td>3.2</td><td>COMPARISON OF THE THREE GEI CONSTRUCTIONS</td><td>419</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>3.2.1 The Components for Presupposition of a Direct Object Compared</td><td>419</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>3.2.2 The Components for Causativity versus Causative Intention with respect to Causation of Having and Causation of Benefit Compared</td><td>422</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>CONCLUSION TO PART III</td><td>424</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>GENERAL CONCLUSION</td><td>426</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>SUMMARY OF CONSTRUCTIONS</td><td>432</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>BIBLIOGRAPHY</td><td>455</td></tr></tbody></table>
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I express my gratitude to Dr Anna Wierzbicka for her guidance and encouragement in the preparation of this work.

I would secondly like to thank my three main language informants: Yu Xiaohui from Harbin, North China; Fan Xiaodong from Beijing and Chang Chun-chi from Keelung, Taiwan.

The Arts Faculty of the Australian National University provided the funds for my field trip to China in 1980-81 for one year and the Commonwealth Department of Education; the postgraduate award which covered the three year period of my research. This project would not have been realized however without the solid backing and encouragement of Professor R.M.W. Dixon who also helped me in the critical reading of this thesis prior to its submission.

I am most grateful to Dr Tim Shopen for his enthusiastic discussion of ideas, reading of early drafts and interest in my work.

I would also like to thank Professor Michael Halliday for inviting me to take part in his Chinese-English Contrastive Linguistics course held at Sydney University in 1979 for his M.A. students from China. This provided a new source of ideas and information on both Chinese Linguistics and reference materials in Chinese at the outset of my research.

During my field trip to China, I stayed at Peking University where Professor Zhu De-xi of the Chinese Department acted as my supervisor. I would like to thank him for his comments, criticism and discussion of several draft chapters of my thesis. I am indebted to Dr Jocelyn Chey of the Australia-China Council for introducing me to Professor Zhu in 1980.
Professor Lu Jianming of the Chinese Department at Peking University should also be mentioned for his stimulating discussion of various grammatical problems in Chinese as part of the course he gave in Modern Chinese Grammar at Bei Da. This provided me with a wealth of data and thought-provoking ideas.

Finally I would like to thank Mrs Svetlana Byrne for her translation of two articles from the Russian by T.N. Nikitina (1958) and G.N. Rajskaja (1958), and Mr Constantin Kiriloff for his transcribing of the Chinese examples in these articles from the Cyrillic script back into Chinese ideographs.
A semantic analysis of passive, causative and dative/
benefactive constructions in Chinese is carried out in the following
work.

In Part I, the view of the *bei* passive as an adversity
passive in its traditional use is upheld and supported principally
by the evidence of the synchronic semantic analysis and secondarily
by other considerations such as its evolution from verb to
grammatical exponent, its restricted usage when compared with the
neutral topic-comment constructions and its function as a warning in
the negative imperative mood.

The treatment of the *bei* passive as a polysemous
structure results in its division into two main types - the
traditional *bei* passive comprising four constructions and the
'Europeanised' literary *bei* passive where the influence of European
languages in translation has led to the loss of the adversity
feature and the modification of the semantic requirements pertaining
to the agent with respect to its two constructions.

The analysis of the *get* passive in English as forming a
complex of constructions - some adverbative and others beneficial in
their overall interpretation - serves as the link between the
discussion of adversity passives in Part I and the discussion of the
purely colloquial passives formed by *rang* and *jiao* in Part II where
parallels are drawn between the non-reflexive adversative *get*
passive and the *rang* passive.

In Part II, an argument in favour of considering the *rang*
and *jiao* passives to be semantically distinct both from one another
and from the *bei* passive is presented. It is contended that *rang* forms passives of "avoidable events" whereas *jiao* forms passives expressing the unexpected nature of the event. The causative constructions formed by *rang* and *jiao* are also treated in Part II and shown to differ considerably in their syntactic behaviour from their respective passive constructions despite the sharing of the same syntactic form. Evidence is adduced to support the view that none of the *jiao* causatives express the meaning of 'let' or 'allow' whereas some of the *rang* causatives do. In this way, *rang* and *jiao* causatives are shown not to be interchangeable.

In Part III an argument is presented against the claim that the preverbal *gei* construction in Chinese is polysemous to the extent of being a benefactive construction that is mutually substitutable with the meanings of two other constructions formed by *ti* 'on behalf of' and *wei* 'for the sake of'. Secondly it is argued that the benefactive *gei* construction is not mutually transformable with either of the two dative constructions formed by *gei* as each of these three constructions not only has a unique syntactic form but consequently a unique semantic structure.
EXPLANATORY NOTE ON THE USE OF THE TERM 'STANDARD CHINESE'

I use the term 'standard Chinese' as the translation of
pǔtōnghuà (普通話) which means literally 'the common language'
rather than the more old-fashioned term of 'Mandarin' that refers to
the use of this language as the language of officialdom, guǎnhuà
(官話), in imperial times.

In 1955, pǔtōnghuà or 'standard Chinese' was officially
proclaimed as the new language norm in China as part of China's
language reform policy. For this purpose, the Beijing dialect of
northern Chinese, beǐfānghuà (北方話), was selected as the model
for the standard pronunciation of pǔtōnghuà while the corpus of
modern works in vernacular Chinese was selected as the model for its
grammar.¹ In general, pǔtōnghuà is loosely based on northern
Chinese with the Beijing dialect acting as its prestige dialect.²

As two of my three main informants were educated through
the medium of this standardized language, I will use 'standard
Chinese' as the translation of pǔtōnghuà in preference to adopting
the term 'Mandarin'.³ Thus, in the text, wherever the abbreviation
'Chinese' occurs, it is intended to refer to pǔtōnghuà.

1. See my article "The Romanization Debate" in *The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs* 4 (1980), 106-118; and Li and Thompson (1981: 1).

2. See Paul Kratochvil, *The Chinese Language Today*, 1968, pp.19-22 for a discussion of the linguistic situation in China today.

3. Kratochvil (1968) similarly translates pǔtōnghuà as 'Modern Standard Chinese'.
My third informant, Chang Chun-chi, is also a native speaker of northern Chinese (or Mandarin) which is, however, known as *guóyǔ* (國語) 'the national language' in Taiwan. It differs from *pǔtōnghuà* mainly in its use of lexical items. For the purposes of syntactic analysis here it will be considered not to vary significantly from the mainland form.
LAYOUT OF LANGUAGE EXAMPLES

Transliteration of all the Chinese examples in the text
is by means of *pinyin*, the transcription system for Chinese
ideographic writing which is based on the Latin alphabet and was
adopted in February 1958 by the National People's Congress of
China.<fnref n="1" />

Each example is quoted in three parts:

(a) Chinese text

(b) morpheme-by-morpheme gloss

(c) free English rendering

1. The morpheme-by-morpheme glosses ignore material not relevant to the discussion at hand such as indicating which morphemes are postpositions or which morpheme in a word is the classifier.

2. The use of the asterisk * before examples means that the sentence is unacceptable for either semantic or grammatical reasons, this being indicated in the adjoining discussion.

3. (*x*) is used as in Li and Thompson (1981) to signify that the example would be unacceptable if it contained the indicated word or morpheme.

4. Nouns in standard Chinese have no distinction for number. In the morpheme-by-morpheme gloss, all nouns are glossed as singular, this being considered the unmarked form.

<footnote n="1">1. See my article on romanization (1980) for the reasons for selecting *pinyin* over other transcription systems.</footnote>
Similarly, verbs do not inflect for the grammatical categories of person, number, tense or mood and these are glossed by the infinitive form in English minus the 'to'. Where neither aspectual marking nor time adverbs suggest an appropriate rendering of time reference for the English, the examples are generally translated by the past tense in English. This is an arbitrary decision, and the reader should bear in mind that a context that would be translated by the English present tense could just as easily be found.

5. As in Li and Thompson (1981), I have adopted the convention of using colons in glosses where more than one word is needed in English to gloss the Chinese morpheme or word, and also for Chinese compound verbs or *verb + affix* combinations whose constituents are separated by a hyphen in the Chinese transliteration. e.g.

(i) **jiejie**
older:sister

(ii) **na-zou**
take:away

(iii) **zuo-le**
do:COM

6. As there is no grammatical category of gender in Chinese nor pronominal distinction of this kind, the third person singular pronoun, **ta**, is glossed in alternate examples as either 'he' or 'she' and sometimes, where appropriate as 'it'. Throughout the English text, I also frequently resort to the otherwise colloquial use of the third person plural pronoun to substitute for the third person singular pronoun when used generically. This applies in all
of its case manifestations: *They, them, their, theirs* and *him* (for themselves) replace *he, him, his* and *himself*. In this way, the use of both the so-called generic 'he' and the unwieldy disjunction *he/she* or *s/he* is avoided. Although this may seem to be "incorrect usage" in some places, I find preferable to either of the latter solutions.

7. Implied meanings of the Chinese examples, necessary to the discussion in progress are enclosed in parentheses in the English translations.

8. Generally, no English translation is given for starred Chinese examples, apart from the morpheme-by-morpheme gloss. In some cases of unacceptable examples, however, the English meaning which I sought to encode by means of the particular Chinese construction is given in parentheses underneath.

9. Tones are indicated only for syllables that are typically stressed in conversational speech. (Unstressed syllables usually lose their full tonal value in Chinese.) Neither is tone sandhi indicated, syllables being given their tone values for citation forms, e.g. *hěn haǒ* would normally be pronounced as *hén haǒ* with the change of a third tone to a second when it precedes another third tone.

10. Except where otherwise indicated, all the translations of quotations from Chinese works and of Chinese examples are my own. This applies as well for two translations from the French of quotations from Bally (1925).
ABBREVIATIONS FOR THE GLOSSING OF
GRAMMATICAL TERMS AND MORPHEMES

ADV exponent forming adverbial phrase out of an adjective : _de_

AN animate; N<sub>AN</sub> = noun denoting animate entity

BA syntactic exponent of the _ba_ construction

BEI syntactic exponent of the _bei_ construction

BOTH...AND represents the syntactic construction _yibian...yibian_ in Chinese (for the purposes of the English gloss only)

BP body part N<sub>BP</sub> = noun denoting a body part

CAUS causative verb

CL noun or verb classifier

COM completive aspect marker _-le_ (used as a verbal suffix); or predicate that denotes a completive event

D.O. direct object

DUR durative aspect marker _-zhe_ or _zai_ (used preverbally)

EXP experiential aspect marker _-guo_; or predicate denoting an experiential event

EXT verb complement of extent or state of affairs which uses _de_ as its exponent

F natural force; N<sub>F</sub> = noun phrase denoting a natural force

GEN exponent of a genitive noun phrase: _de_

IMP imperative

IN inanimate; N<sub>IN</sub> = noun denoting an inanimate entity

I.O. indirect object

INC sentential inceptive aspect marker _le_ or inchoative aspect marker _-qilai_ (verbal suffix)

INT intensifier: verbal suffix _-si_ or adverb _zhen_ "really"

LE completive aspect marker

LOC N<sub>LOC</sub> = noun phrase denoting a place or locale

NEG<sub>1</sub> negative marker _bu_
NEG₂ negative marker *mei (you)*

NOM nominalizing construction formed by (shi)...*de*

NP noun phrase

O Object

P pause particle; NPp = noun phrase denoting a person

POSS possession; NPPOSS = noun phrase denoting a possession

PL plural morpheme *-men*

Q question particle occurring sentence finally

REL exponent forming a relative or adjectival clause: *de*

RP rhetorical particle occurring sentence finally

sb "somebody"

TENT tentative aspect

V verb; VTR = transitive verb

VP verb phrase

VR resultative verb compound
The semantic analysis of passive, causative and dative/
benefactive constructions in Chinese which is to be presented in the
following chapters serves as an investigation into the inter-
relationship of meaning and form, characterised by both cases of
polysemy in syntax where the one syntactic configuration is used to
grammaticalise several different meanings and by cases of the same
morpheme being used to form different syntactic constructions with
distinct grammatical meanings.

The passive constructions formed by *bei* in Chinese and
the passive and causative constructions formed by both *rang* and *jiao*
are examples of this first linguistic phenomenon, each kind of
construction, whether it be passive or causative, comprising a
number of discrete subconstructions in itself. The polysemy of the
*get* passive in English provides another exemplification of the first
phenomenon.

The use of *gei* 'give' to form benefactive and dative
constructions in Chinese which are not only distinct in their
semantic structures but also in their syntax represents the second
type of linguistic phenomenon.

One implication of the following analysis is that no two
different syntactic constructions are held to share the same
grammaticalised meaning. Consequently, this analysis upholds the
viewpoint that difference in form necessarily correlates with
difference in meaning.<fnref n="1" />

(cont.)

<footnote n="1">1. Dwight Bolinger's articles "Meaning and Form: Some Fallacies of Asemantic Grammar" (1975) and "Transitivity and Spatiality: The Passive of Prepositional Verbs" (1977) as well as his</footnote>
(i) Methodology:

A corollary of this viewpoint is that all syntactic con-
structions need to be explicated first of all in terms of their
semantic structure. Hence this analysis is based on the belief that
the study of semantics is fundamental and prior to the study of
syntax. The ensuing analysis upholds such a belief implicitly in
first investigating the underlying semantic features that surface in
the particular syntactic forms and then explicitly in formulating
the semantic representations for each construction.

The semantic features or properties postulated in the
form of components for each semantic representation are consequently
considered to be invariant features of the given constructions.

In the formal analysis, a small set of terms from natural
language is used as a non-arbitrary semantic metalanguage. This set
consists of both primitive concepts such as *want*, *think of*, *say*,
*become*, *I*, *you* and *be a part of*² and near primitives such as *do*,
*happen*, *good*, *bad* and *because*. In this way, the need for the
invented symbols and markers of artificial metalanguages is
eliminated.

This method is based upon the type of analysis advocated
in the work of Anna Wierzbicka in the area of semantics of natural
language and may be considered an application thereof. The method-

1. (contd.)

monograph *Meaning and Form* (Longman: 1977) epitomise this viewpoint. He states in (1975: 7-8) that "in syntax, there is no such thing as two different surface structures with the same deep structure (that is, with the same meaning)..." and sets out to prove this to be the case.

2. See Wierzbicka (1972: 16) for the full set of semantic primitives and exegesis thereof.
ology used here is elaborated upon in her books *Semantic Primitives* (Athenäum: 1972) and *Lingua Mentalis* (Academic Press: 1980).<fnref n="3" />

The semantic metalanguage is applied systematically in the reductive paraphrase of each syntactic construction with each interpretation being subsequently formulated in the less complex but more readily comprehensible units of natural language, some of which were exemplified above.

The consistent use of simple concepts such as *do* and *want* in this type of formalization enables the semantic representations to be compared in a systematic way with one another to reveal any structural relationships which exist. This applies not only to related subconstructions belonging to each of the general constructions examined such as the passive constructions formed by *bei*, *rang* and *jiao* in Chinese and *get* in English but also between syntactic constructions of different types, for example, some of the passive and causative constructions formed by *rang* may thus be shown to be semantically related by virtue of both these *rang* constructions having one component that is similar (though not completely identical) in their semantic structures.

Secondly, these semantic representations in being explicit displays of the semantic structure are open to immediate verification on the part of speakers as opposed, for example, to the case of artificial metalanguages which need to be learnt before they can be applied or interpreted.

<footnote n="3">3. See also particularly her articles "Ethnosyntax and the philosophy of grammar" (1979a) and "Are grammatical categories vague or polysemous? The Japanese 'adversative' passive in a typological context" (1979b) for the methodology used in the semantic analysis of syntactic constructions.</footnote>
Note that ad hoc terms such as 'adversative passive', 'permissive causative' and 'benefactive' construction are employed purely in the role of abbreviatory labels for the constructions examined. It is the semantic representations which serve as the most fully adequate means of explicating each particular component of meaning in a precise and exact manner. At best, informal terms are only able to vaguely allude to these features. Therefore, it is also claimed that only the semantic representations can accurately predict all acceptable examples of each construction.

This analytic procedure constitutes one step towards an ultimate explication of the meaning of each grammatical construction to be examined that would be entirely formulated in terms of a small set of semantic indefinables hypothesized to exist in every language.<fnref n="4" />

Although the formulation of the semantic structure of each grammatical construction under investigation here is the ultimate goal of my analysis, this is not to say that syntactic features are overlooked. As Bolinger aptly puts it: "grammatical restrictions flow as corollaries" from meaning (1975: 16). Several chapters deal specifically with the syntactic behaviour of the several different types of constructions.

(ii) *Resumé of Contents*

In the following analysis, three major kinds of syntactic constructions are examined: These are the passive, causative and

<footnote n="4">4. See *Introduction* in Wierzbicka (1972) and the one in Wierzbicka (1980) for a full explanation.</footnote>
dative/benefactive constructions in Chinese. The analysis is carried out, moreover, with reference to the analogous syntactic construct ions in English although these, in the main part, do not undergo any exhaustive treatment here except in the case of the _get_ passive in English which due to its being regarded as a colloquial passive has generally been overlooked by researchers in much the same way as the _rang_ passive has - its Chinese counterpart. These two complexes of constructions are compared in Part II.

In Part I, the passive construction formed by _bei_ is examined in detail with reference to many points of interest in other analyses of this 'adversative' passive. It is contended that for the general form of the _bei_ passive, the semantic properties of adversity, completiveness, the identifiable nature of the subject/ undergoer and the obligatory expression of the agent are inherent features. After the discussion of the general form is completed, I attempt to account for the polysemy of the _bei_ passive by justifying the postulation of six discrete subconstructions which while sharing these general semantic components display in addition subtle semantic differences. Finally, the non-traditional Europeanized form of the _bei_ passive is examined and found to comprise two sub- constructions of the agentless and agentful types. Furthermore, for these two subconstructions, the component of adversity has been completely neutralized.

Part I ends with two in-depth analyses of two different types of passive constructions, the first one being the _bei_ passive of bodily effect and the second, the _get_ passive in English. The analysis of the colloquial _get_ passive acts as a bridge between the discussion of the _bei_ passive, a passive construction which belongs
to a more formal speech register in Chinese and the analyses of the
two colloquial passives carried out in Part II where the polysemy of
syntactic constructions formed by **rang** and **jiao** is specifically
investigated. This analysis is related to Part I by the fact that
**rang** and **jiao** both form passive constructions, though be it of a
colloquial nature and distinguished from Part I by the fact that
both these exponents of the passive also form periphrastic causative
constructions which exhibit apparently identical syntactic form and
behaviour to their passive counterparts.

The task of the analysis here then is not only to
differentiate the **rang** and **jiao** passives from the **bei** passive but
also to differentiate the **rang** and **jiao** passives respectively from
their causative counterparts. This differentiation is carried out
from both semantic and syntactic angles after a brief look at the
complex of **shi** causative constructions in the introductory chapter.
The latter in being largely restricted to use in the literary domain
is not given any in-depth treatment. Moreover, **shi** is not used to
form any passive constructions.

In this part, the **rang** passive is likened to the non-
reflexive adversative **get** passive in English. Both may be regarded
as passives of avoidability, specifically, passive constructions
which encode that the subject/undergoer could have avoided or
prevented the passive event.

In Part I and Part II, it becomes evident that all the
passive constructions in Chinese are adversative in nature. — No
beneficial passives such as the **duoc** passive in Vietnamese are to be
found.
The predisposition of analytic passives in Chinese to express misfortune having been established, in Part III we turn to constructions expressing benefit and examine the use of the verb *gei* 'give' as a syntactic exponent to form benefactive and dative constructions in Chinese. Although *gei* also forms an adversative passive, it is not examined in depth in this analysis due to its being a purely dialectal as opposed to standard form.

These constructions, in contradistinction to those formed by *bei*, *rang* and *jiao* in Chinese and *get* in English are not polysemous in nature apart from the construction where *gei* occurs preverbally, a syntactic form shared by both the *gei* passive and *gei* benefactive construction. On this point I take issue with claims to the contrary that preverbal *gei* is three-ways polysemous to the extent that two of its meanings are identical to those of two other syntactically distinct but supposedly benefactive constructions formed by *ti* and *wei*.

Moreover I argue in Part III against any transformational relation holding between the two dative and one benefactive construction and justify this viewpoint by showing that even though the three constructions share the one syntactic exponent – *gei* – not only is their syntactic structure different but their semantic structures are also distinct.

Thus, Part I and Part II constitute studies of polysemy in syntax while Part III constitutes a study of syntactic constructions that are different in form and by consequence, different in grammaticalised meaning, regardless of the fact that they are all formed by *gei*.
PART I

THE TRADITIONAL ADVERSATIVE BEI PASSIVE
Adversity passives, in particular the *bei* passive in Chinese are the topic of analysis in Part I. In general, the investigation into the polysemy of the *bei* passive in Chinese results in the division of the general *bei* passive structure into two main types, these being the 'traditional adversative *bei* passive' and the *bei* passive which due to the impact of European languages in translation has undergone certain modifications to its semantic structure. The second type is called the 'Europeanized' passive in this analysis to distinguish it from the traditional *bei* passive throughout the discussion. The Europeanized *bei* passive is confined to the literary sphere as opposed to the traditional *bei* passive which is used in both vernacular and written Chinese.

Secondarily, the polysemy of the *get* passive in English is examined due to the fact that the adversity feature is present in some of its constructions and for the purposes of comparison with the *rang* passive treated in Part II. As the final chapter of Part I, it serves as a link with the following analyses of the *rang* and *jiao* passive and causative constructions as in its analysis some of the semantic properties of the *rang* passive in particular are fore-shadowed.

In the introduction to Part I, the view is put forward that the motivation for the use of an analytic passive construction in Chinese is the encoding of adversity. Otherwise, the neutral topic-comment constructions are preferred to the use of the *bei* passive as they are not only able to encode the semantic undergoer as the subject, but do so without recourse to any special syntactic
or morphological exponent and without the concomitant expression of
adversity.

A brief description of the historical development of the verb *bei* to come to be used as the syntactic exponent of an adversity passive precedes the discussion of the general semantic properties of the traditional *bei* passive in Chapter 2: the adverse state of affairs which comes about for the undergoer; the "identifiability" of the subject and the completive nature of the predicate in the passive.

In Section 1.1, a semantic analysis supporting the postulation of the feature of adversity is carried out, followed by an evaluation of two other methods of analysis that have been applied to the *bei* passive - the verb classification method and the Case Grammar approach. The fact that the *bei* passive serves as a warning when used in the negative imperative mood is used as further evidence to support the claim that it is intrinsically adversative.

A necessary preliminary to the discussion of the completive nature of the passive predicate in Section 1.3 is the description of the semantic characteristics of the subject given in Section 1.2 and the definition of the notion of "identifiability".

In Section 1.3, aspectual marking, negation and modal verbs are investigated in order to determine which are compatible with the *bei* passive and it is shown that only those which do not violate the encoding of a completed event can co-occur with it.

An argument against the analysis of *bei* only in terms of co-occurring verbs is presented in Section 1.4. Here it is pointed out that the characterisation of the type of verb to be found in the *bei* passive as either 'transitive' or 'disposal' in nature is inadequate in terms of accounting for all the data. It is proposed instead that a subtler semantic characterisation in terms of whether
or not an event can be understood as directly affecting the
undergoer can account for all the data in combination with the other
components of the semantic formula. This includes counterexamples
to the 'transitive' or 'disposal' verb hypothesis which contain
verbs of happening and verbs of emotion.

This discussion concludes the analysis of the semantic
properties of the general *bei* passive and leads into Chapter 2 where
the semantic structures of the six separate constructions belonging
to the *bei* passive - four adversative and two Europeanized - are
postulated and their components justified. These are the

ADVERSATIVE *BEI* PASSIVES

(i) Adversative <u>Bei</u> Passive with a Person as the Undergoer

(ii) Adversative <u>Bei</u> Passive of Possessions

(iii) Adversative <u>Bei</u> Passive with a Natural Force

(iv) Adversative <u>Bei</u> Passive of Bodily Effect

EUROPEANIZED *BEI* PASSIVES

(i) Agentless Europeanized *Bei* Passive

(ii) Europeanized *Bei* Passive with a Collective Agent

First of all, the argument supporting the division of the
*bei* passive into the two main types - adversative and Europeanized -
is put forward in Section 2.1. I claim that the traditional *bei*
passive still encodes the semantic features of adversity and overt
expression of the agent as opposed to the Europeanized passive where
these features have either been lost or modified. The Europeanized
passive is then further subdivided into an agentless construction
and one requiring a collective agent.
Three of the four adversative *bei* passives are treated in Section 2.2 where their semantic formulae are proposed and components of meaning contained therein are justified.

The fourth adversative *bei* passive - the passive of bodily effect - is singled out for an in-depth analysis of its semantic components, presented in Chapter 3, due to its special syntactic configuration with a postverbal noun. Comparison is made here with constructions in four other languages - French, German, Italian and Polish - which also express an inalienable relationship between part and whole.

Finally, in Chapter 4, the analysis of the polysemy of the *get* passive in English is presented. The polarisation of the *get* passive into events which express adversity and events which express benefit or good fortune for the subject and undergoer is a major feature of this description.

The general syntactic structure of the adversative *bei* passive under examination in the following pages takes this form:

SUBJECT
NOUN PHRASE

BEI

AGENT
NOUN PHRASE

VERB PHRASE

(Undergoer)

Mali bei tufei kun-qilai-le.

(name)

BEI

bandits

tie:up : COM

Mary was tied up by the bandits.

It will be pointed out in the course of the presentation which semantic and syntactic features are shared with the two colloquial passives formed by *rang* and *jiao*; these constructions being the subject of Part II.
## 0.1 THE MOTIVATION FOR THE USE OF THE PASSIVE IN CHINESE

There must be a definite motivation for using the *bei* construction, otherwise it's better to use a *ba* construction or a middle voice one. Even if we want to use the undergoer as the subject, we don't have to use *bei* ...

-Lü Shuxiang (1965:291)

In *Theory of Chinese Grammar*, Wang Li examines the applicability to Chinese of the five reasons given by Jespersen in *Essentials of English Grammar* for the choice of the "passive turn" in English.<fnref n="1" /> Three of the five reasons prove to be inapplicable to Chinese, this being the case for the first two that Jespersen lists, presented below:

(1) The active subject (what would be the active subject if we had chosen the active turn) cannot be easily stated:

> Her father was killed in the Boer War.

(2) The active subject is self-evident from the context:

> He was elected Member of Parliament for Leeds.

Here, an active form topic-comment construction would be used in Chinese:

1. Wenti taolun qingchu - le.

problem discuss clear : COM

The problem has been clarified through discussion.

Neither is Jespersen's third reason applicable to Chinese:

(3) There may be a special reason (tact or delicacy of sentiment) for not mentioning the active subject; thus the mention of the first person is avoided, in writing more frequently than in speaking.

<footnote n="1">1. Wang Li, *Zhongguo Yufa Lilun* (1944), I, pp. 178-181.</footnote>

<footnote>Otto Jespersen, *Essentials of English Grammar* (1913), pp.120-1.</footnote>
In this case, a subjectless active sentence would be used
in Chinese. Consider the opening sentence taken from an article in
a linguistics periodical:

2. Ba "gei" zi fenxi-cheng dongci jian jieci, keyi
BA 'give' word analyse: as verb and preposition, can
bijiao jiandan de jieshi xuduo jufa xianxiang
quite simply adv explain many syntactic phenomena

If (we) analyse GEI as both a verb and preposition, (we)
can quite simply explain many syntactic phenomena. 2

Only the last two of Jespersen's conditions are
considered by Wang Li to be relevant to the Chinese situation. This
concerns cases where the agent, which Jespersen refers to as the
"converted subject", is explicitly mentioned:

(4) Where it is indicated ("converted subject") the reason why the passive turn is preferred is generally the greater interest taken in the passive than in the active subject.

(5) Or the passive turn may facilitate the connexion of
one sentence with another:

He rose to speak, and was listened to with
enthusiasm by the great crowd present.

I think that the last two conditions may be considered
different facets of the same component of meaning that is being
expressed in both English and Chinese passives regardless of whether
the agent is mentioned or not: "I want to say something about
person A (the undergoer), not because I want to say something about
anything else"³. This is part of the illocutionary force,

2. Zhu Dexi, "Syntactic Problems Associated with the Verb GEI", *Fangyan*, No.2 (1979), p.81.

3. Anna Wierzbicka, *The Case for Surface Case*, Linguistica Extranea, Studia 9 (Ann Arbor: Karoma, 1980), p.66.
so to speak, of passives. If reference to an agent is made, as in
agentful passive constructions, then this is in order to say
something more about the undergoer: "I say something about person B
(the agent) because I want to say something about person A (the
undergoer)." The subordinate role of the agent has been clearly
defined in A. Wierzbicka's "Case for Surface Case" (1980:65) in this
way: "... in a 'full' passive the speaker ... 'uses' the agent as
an instrument of saying something about the patient ..."

As a consequence of adopting the above standpoint, I
disagree with Jespersen's first two reasons as being primary
motivations for the use of the passive in English (where the agent
is either unknown or self-evident from the context). Rather, it is
simply a case of the agent not being the main topic, the primary
interest being focussed on the undergoer, as the formalization above
shows.

In English, the _be_ and _get_ passives may or may not have
the agent expressed, that is, we have both agentful and agentless
constructions. In Chinese, however, the agent is always expressed
in the non-Europeanized and colloquial form of the _bei_ passive (q.v.
Chapter 2). Hence, this is one reason why the agentless English
passive is not likely to be translated into Chinese by the _bei_
passive. Secondly, passive constructions in Chinese are more
restricted and marked in usage than they are in English due to a
larger number of semantic constraints affecting them, as will be
revealed in the following analysis. Wang Li was one of the first
linguists to point out that while it may be possible to transform
most active sentences in English into the _be_ passive this is not the
case for the _bei_ passive in Chinese (1944:181):
In Chinese ... the application of the passive
is much narrower than that of the active. Many
active sentences may not be freely changed into
the passive. For example: ...

Wo du Hong Lou Meng. [I am reading "Dream of the Red Chamber"] cannot be changed into Hong Lou Meng bei wo du. ["Dream of the Red Chamber" was read by me.]

4

It is a well-known fact that Chinese has little
inflectional morphology.<fnref n="5" /> Unlike most Indo-European languages,
there is no requirement for the congruence of subject and verb in
the sentence, indicated by inflection of the verb for person and
number. A comparison of the conjugation of the French verb avoir
'have' in the present tense with its Chinese counterpart yǒu shows
this to be the case. The Chinese verb form remains invariant:

<table><thead><tr><th>FRENCH</th><th>CHINESE</th><th>ENGLISH</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>J' ai</td><td>Wǒ yǒu</td><td>I have</td></tr><tr><td>Tu as</td><td>nǐ yǒu</td><td>you have</td></tr><tr><td>il a</td><td>tā yǒu</td><td>he has</td></tr><tr><td>nous avons</td><td>wǒmen yǒu</td><td>we have</td></tr><tr><td>vous avez</td><td>nǐmen yǒu</td><td>you have</td></tr><tr><td>ils ont</td><td>tāmen yǒu</td><td>they have</td></tr></tbody></table>

In this respect, English has rather a vestigial
morphological system compared to other Indo-European languages.
Despite this however, English grammar exhibits a high correlation

<footnote n="4">4. Wang Liao Yi, Hanyu Yufa Gangyao, (Shanghai: Xin Zhishi, 1957), p.110. (n.b. "Wang Liao Yi" is a nom de plume for Wang Li.)</footnote>

<footnote n="5">5. See, for example, Yuen Ren Chao, *A Grammar of Spoken Chinese*, (Berkeley: Univ. California, 1968), p.198.</footnote>

<footnote>Charles N. Li & Sandra A. Thompson, *Mandarin Chinese*, (Berkeley: Univ. California, 1981), p.11.</footnote>
between its grammatical and semantic roles with respect to the syntactic subject: The subject of a majority of active sentences is typically the semantic agent and, apart from cases of ellipsis and some styles of answering, the subject and its verb are both obligatory constituents of the sentence. In contrast to this, the subject of a syntactic construction in "active form" in Chinese is as likely to be the semantic undergoer as the agent. It is more accurately described as the sentential topic than as the subject understanding "subject" in the grammatical sense of governing agreement with the verb.

In fact, the lack of this stringent condition requiring subject-verb agreement which makes Chinese seem to be "freer" in its syntax, enables passive-like expressions to be encoded in active form. This is known as the "Topic-Comment" construction or the "passive without *bei*".<fnref n="6" />

Yuen Ren Chao espouses the viewpoint of the subject-predicate distinction not providing the optimal method of analysis for Chinese grammar. He considers that the crucial distinction to be made at sentence level in Chinese grammar is that of topic and comment, treating the Chinese sentence unit as being made up of two smaller sentences with these respective functions. (1968:183).

The loose structure of sentences in topic-comment form is evident from the ease with which pause particles may be inserted

<footnote n="6">6. Chao, *Grammar*, p.69ff., and Li & Thompson, (1976:459) call it "topic-comment"; Wang Liaoyi, *Gangyao*, p.112, Guo Derun (1981:37) and Hong Xinheng (1956:26) call it "the passive without *bei*" among others.</footnote>
after the topic as opposed to any other constituent, for example the
pause particle a:

3a. Zhang San a, wo yidianr bu xihuan.
(name) RP I one:bit not like
As for Zhang San, I don't like him one bit.

3b. *Zhang San wo a yidianr bu xihuan.
(name) I RP one:bit not like

This syntactic property lends weight to the treatment of the topic-
comment construction as being composed of two minor sentences.

The basic topic-comment construction has this form:

I
NOUN PHRASE VERB PHRASE
(undergoer) (action verb)
Topic Comment

3. Mian'ao dou mai-guang - le.
jacket all sell:bare : COM
The padded jackets have all been sold out.

4. Shu kan-wan - le
book read:finish : COM
As for the book, (I've) finished reading it.

Furthermore, an agent may be readily assimilated into
this construction as part of the comment, the undergoer remaining in
its function as the sentential topic. This constitutes a second
kind of topic-comment construction and it has the syntactic form:

II
NOUN PHRASE NOUN PHRASE VERB PHRASE
(undergoer) (agent) (action verb)
Topic Comment
5. **Zhaotie wo yijing tie-shang - le.**
   notice I already paste:up : COM
   As for the notices, I've already pasted them up.

6. **Yu ta bu chi.**
   fish he not eat
   "Fish isn't eaten by him."

Hence, agentless *be* passives with inanimate subjects are most likely to be translated into Chinese by the first kind of topic-comment construction exemplified by (3) and (4), and agentful *be* passives by the second topic-comment construction unless the latter meet certain other special conditions of the *bei* passive.

The topic-comment construction in Chinese, under which several different semantic structures are subsumed, pre-empts the need for a passive construction like the *be* passive in English, the latter also being regarded as a syntactic means of topicalizing the semantic undergoer in this analysis.

Looking at this feature conversely, Loh Dian-yang observes that in English a [grammatical] subject is necessary and hence the extensive use of the passive form, whereas the Chinese active verbs, not needing a [grammatical] subject, allow agentless active sentences to be used, exemplified by (2) above, (1959: II, pp.66-7).⁷

7. The term "subject" is used in this thesis in Hockett's sense of "the person or thing about which something is said". I prefer the use of "subject" to "topic" in that "topic" refers only to the semantic or pragmatic functions of the given NP within the sentence whereas "subject" also refers to the role of this NP as syntactic pivot - occurring in first position of an NP in the sentence. In Chinese, as there is no subject-verb congruence, the syntactic pivot cannot be described as the grammatical subject. See Li and Thompson (1976) for a discussion of subject and topic in Chinese.
Wang Li also claims more specifically that this active-form "passive without *bei*" is preferable when the subject is inanimate (1944, I, p.178). Indeed, if the topic is animate and non-human there may be ambiguity, out of context:

7. Ji chi - le.

chicken eat : COM

1) The chicken has been eaten

2) The chicken has eaten.

However, if the topic is a person, then the construction may only have an agentive reading:

8. Wo da - le yi-dun.

I hit : COM one:CL

1) I gave (somebody) a beating up.

2) *I was beaten up.*

In other words, only non-human animate NPs as the topic may be a source of potential ambiguity. Inanimate NPs as the topic are understood as the undergoer and personal NPs as the agent. However, when we have two noun phrases designating persons as in the second topic-comment construction, the topic denotes a separate entity from the agent and is in this case, understood to be the undergoer:

9. Didi wo da - le yi-dun.

younger: I hit : COM one:CL

brother

As for my (younger) brother, I gave him a beating.

As I have pointed out, the latter must be considered a different construction to the former.

The lack of any morphological change when predicates or sentences act as the topic gives further evidence of the reliance on
syntax in Chinese rather than morphology to signify grammatical
relations:

10. Da taijiquan hen you haochu.
play shadow:boxing very have advantage
Doing shadow boxing is very good for you.

11. Ni bu qu biaoming ni dui ta bu zhichi.
you not go show you to him not support
Your not going means you don't support him.

The V-O predicate structure in (10) and the sentential structure in
(11) acting as topics may be used as independent sentences without
any change in form:

12. Da taijiquan!
play shadow:boxing
Take up shadow boxing!

13. Ni bu qu.
you not go
You're not going.

In English, the infinitive form of the verb or its gerund must be
used when the predicates or sentences are used as subjects (viz. "To
do shadow boxing" or "Doing shadow boxing ...") in place of the
(subject and) finite verb in the independent sentences.

This section has shown that there are other grammatical
strategies available to encode passive-like expressions or more
accurately, ones which make the semantic undergoer the sentential
topic, with the topic-comment construction being singled out as
serving this function.
Moreover, it is generally agreed that the topic-comment construction is the usual means of topicalizing undergoers and not the syntactically marked passive with *bei*. For example, Wang Huan considers sentences which do not use *bei* to express the passive to be the more prevalent<sup>8</sup> and this viewpoint is shared by Loh Dian-yang who remarks that the syntactic passive is limited in Chinese, notional passives being used in most cases (1959:II,68).

If the topic-comment construction is the more common and thus the less semantically restricted topicalization strategy in Chinese, when are the syntactically marked passive constructions used such as the *bei* passive and what semantic purpose do they fulfill?

After a brief look at the historical development of the *bei* passive that is semantically relevant to the discussion of its modern day usage, I will put forward the viewpoint that the *bei* passive expresses an additional semantic component over and above that of wanting to say something primarily about the undergoer of an event. It also expresses the unfortunate nature of the event for the undergoer. This is the feature which accounts for its more restricted usage.

<footnote n="8">8. Wang Huan, 'Ba' Zi Ju he 'Bei' Zi Ju (Shanghai, Xin Zhishi, 1957), p.46.</footnote>
## 0.2 A NOTE ON THE HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE PASSIVE:

In Archaic Chinese (the period up to the 3rd century A.D.),⁹ _bei_ was used as a full verb with a meaning similar to that of 'receive' but in the sense of 'suffer'.¹⁰ Here are two examples from the _Shi Ji_ (The Historical Records) of the Han dynasty (206 BC - 220 AD) compiled around 109-91 BC which illustrate this verbal use of _bei_. In both cases, it will be seen that _bei_ is followed by a nominal and the construction has the form NP + BEI + NP:

14. <u>Gao zu bei jiu.</u>
emperor "suffer:from" wine
"The Emperor was drunk"

15. <u>Shen bei shu shi chuang.</u>
body "suffer:from" several ten wound
"(His) body received many wounds."

At this early stage in the development of the _bei_ passive, an agent phrase was not permitted and it was only at the beginning of the Middle Archaic period (4th-12th centuries A.D.) that it began to appear.¹¹ In fact, it became a very common "alternative" form of the passive during the Six Dynasties period (222-589 A.D.) as exemplified in the _Shi Shuo Xin Yu_ (New Anecdotes of Social Talk) of the 5th century A.D.:

9. Wang Li, _Hanyu Shigao_ (1980) I, p.35. The different periods of Classical Chinese mentioned in this section follow Wang Li's classification.

10. P. Bennett in "The Evolution of Passive and Disposal Sentences" (JCL, No.9, 1981) points out that "to suffer from" is often a more accurate gloss than "to receive". Footnote 6, p.87. [Examples (14) and (16) are from his article and example (15) from Liu Shiru (1956).]

11. Ibid., p.76. See also Wang Li, _Hanyu Shigao_, II, pp.425-426.
16. **Liangzi bei Su Jun hai.**
(name) suffer (name) harm
"Liangzi was harmed by Su Jun."

The insertion of the agent phrase into the *bei* passive was a development contingent upon the interpretation of the final element in the construction as a verb, and no longer as a nominal as in the first two examples.<fnref n="12" /> Such an interpretation was of course facilitated by the fact that parts of speech were not morphologically distinct, which remains largely the case in Modern Chinese.<fnref n="13" /> The implication for the morpheme *bei* was that its grammatical function was consequently reinterpreted as being the syntactic exponent of the passive and no longer as a full verb.

From the semantic aspect Wang Li differs from Bennett (1981) in holding the viewpoint that the verb *bei* had two distinct meanings - both 'cover' and 'suffer', and that it was from the latter meaning that *bei* evolved from its verbal use to its grammatical use in the passive construction. Both meanings of 'cover' and 'suffer' furthermore, stem from an even earlier use of *bei* to mean 'put on the body'.<fnref n="14" />

That one of the meanings of the verb *bei* in Archaic Chinese was 'suffer' or 'suffer from' is highly pertinent to a synchronic semantic analysis of the *bei* passive in Modern Chinese

<footnote n="12">12. Two linguists who have put forward this kind of analysis of the development of the *bei* passive are Liu Shiru in "The Origins of the Passive Form" (YWXX, 1956, No.8) and Paul Bennett, op.cit.</footnote>

<footnote n="13">13. See Chao (1968:183).</footnote>

<footnote n="14">14. Wang Li, (1980), II, p.420. Also stated in "The Development of the Passive in Chinese", in *Yuyanxue Luncong*, ed. Wang Li, 1957, p.10. Gao Mingkai (1957:207) similarly claims that *bei* had the meaning of 'cover' as a verb.</footnote>
such as the one that will be presented below, especially as the
characterization of this construction as an adversative passive will
be maintained, a viewpoint which has remained the subject of much
debate in this area of Chinese linguistics. As Wang Li remarks: "a
newly arisen grammatical construction only adopts a lexical form
that is mutually appropriate for its expression."<fnref n="15" />

<footnote n="15">15. Wang Li, (1980), II, p.430.</footnote>
# 1 THE SEMANTIC AND SYNTACTIC FEATURES OF THE _BEI_ PASSIVE IN GENERAL

## 1.1 ADVERSITY

> The passive form must describe an
> unfortunate or unexpected event.

> - Wang Li (1944:181)

### 1.1.1 Other Treatments of the Question of Adversity

The traditional view of the _bei_ passive is that it is an adversative passive. In 1953, the Linguistics Institute of the Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing published a short article in the periodical _Chinese Language_ paraphrasing the semantic structure of the _bei_ passive in this way, though be it imprecise:

> _Bei_ expresses the phenomenon of suffering
> ... According to traditional usage, the
> _bei_ construction mainly explains that
> there has been suffering for the subject;
> naturally the suffering is not of one's
> own free will, and as a result, it can
> only express that there has been harm or
> unhappiness and unwillingness - this kind
> of behaviour.

17

In the following discussion of the _bei_ passive, not only will a much more precise representation of the semantics of the _bei_ passive be proposed but it will also be contended that the typical analysis of the _bei_ passive as being only one construction should be refined to the postulation of a general form which comprises several different constructions, determined by structural differences such as the kinds of nouns filling the roles of agent and undergoer.

To use such descriptive words as 'suffering', 'harm', 'unwillingness' or 'unhappiness' for one of the semantic features of

<footnote n="17">17. Zhongguo Kexueyuan Yuyan Yanjiusuo Yufa Xiaozu, "Zhudongci", Zhongguo Yuwen, 9, No.26 (1953), 29-30. (Hereafter known as Yuyan Yanjiusuo.)</footnote>
the *bei* passive is vague and imprecise at best in terms of these
words serving as the tools of semantic analysis. In formulating
semantic representations it is important to avoid using complex
terms such as these and consequently the tautologies of definition
which result: For example, if the passive event in question is
characterized as both "unfortunate" and causing "suffering" to the
undergoer, economy and conciseness of definition have been
relinquished in that both terms could have been defined more simply
in terms of a person "not wanting" the event to happen.

Hence, one objective of this analysis is to show that the
*bei* passive is not both an 'unfortunate and unexpected' event as
defined by Wang Li, but only an "unfortunate" one. Thereby, the
semantic representation can be disencumbered of an unwanted and
superfluous disjunction. Finally, it should be noted that for the
sake of brevity, the term 'adversity' will be used consistently
throughout the analysis to contrast the *bei* passive with other
constructions which are neutral and "non-subjective" as far as this
semantic feature is concerned. I emphasise that this is merely for
the purpose of informal semantic description and does not in any way
serve as a substitute for the semantic representation where the
adverse state of affairs for the undergoer is explicated in less
complex terms as an event which was 'bad' for the undergoer.

The adversative nature of the *bei* passive is in fact its
most debated feature. The majority of linguists who have written
specifically on this topic claim that the traditional usage of this
passive was as an adversative passive, and purely so. Nonetheless,
their argument proceeds to the effect that this 'semantic colouring'
has been lost or diluted due to the influence of European languages
on Chinese with the influx of translated works which began early
this century.¹⁸ It is common to find such

18. The 18 references listed below deal with this feature of the *bei* passive in some depth, most sharing the view given above:

(1) Y.R. Chao, (1968), p.703.

(2) C. Chu, (1973), pp.449-50.

(3) Guo Derun, (1981), p.30.

(4) C. Li and S. Thompson, (1981), p.493, p.496.

(5) Li Linding, (1980), p.411.

(6) Liang Donghan, (1960), pp.63-6.

(7) Liu Shiru, (1956), p.33.

(8) Loh Dian-yang, (1959), I, p.131; II, p.67.

(9) Lu Shuxiang and Zhu Dexi, (1952), p.87.

(10) G.N. Rajskaja, (1958), p.225.

(11) Wang Huan, (1957), p.43; p.56.

(12) Wang Li, (1944), I, p.181.

(13) Wang Li, (1947), I, p.173.

(14) Wang Li, (1957), I, p.15.

(15) Wang Li, (1980), II, p.432; p.435.

(16) Wang Liaoyi, (1957), p.111.

(17) Zhang Zhigong, (1957), p.92.

(18) Zhongguokexueyuan Yuyansuo, (1953), p.30.

Of the 18 in-depth studies of the *bei* passive consulted, 15 uphold the standpoint that *bei* traditionally expressed adversity, before it was 'eroded' by the influence of various European languages in translation. Only three analyses oppose it, setting up various counterarguments. These are Liang (1960), Liu (1956) and Chu (1973).

There are also many other analyses of the *bei* passive which do not treat this particular feature specifically. These are listed in the bibliography.

It also needs to be pointed out that Wang Li is responsible for five of 15 works included in the "pro" category and indeed he seems to be the earliest proponent of this standpoint, the remaining ten works (articles or grammars) following suit, many of them making reference to Wang Li's writings.

Liang Donghan (1960) and Liu Shiru (1956) take issue with Wang Li's claim and counterargue, particularly Liang, that even in the traditional usage of the passive, exemplified by the vernacular novel *Hong Lou Meng* [*Dream of the Red Chamber*] of the 18th century, examples of *bei* expressing neutral and fortunate events are to be found.

Chu (1973) begins by qualifying the generally accepted standpoint but ends up rejecting it overall, claiming that pleasant events can be incorporated into the passive provided that the Benefactive case is not required in doing so (p.460).

(contd)
statements as this one by Wang Huan:

In colloquial speech before the May 4th Movement [1919], *bei* sentences which described unhappy or unfortunate events were definitely in the majority ... Modern Chinese has been influenced by the literature of foreign languages so that *bei* sentences which do not describe unhappy events have increased. (1957:p.43, p.45)

This relegates the adversative status of the *bei* passive to the limbo land of "might-be's".

Wang Li makes the much stronger claim that this development has only taken place in the written language, whereas colloquially the restriction to unfortunate or unhappy events still prevails (1957:15). Lu and Zhu (1952:87) and Guo Derun (1981:30) all echo this view. The literary - colloquial distinction is crucial to the following analysis and is elaborated upon in section 2.1 which deals with the "Europeanized" *bei* passive.

Let us briefly digress upon the usage of the *bei* passive: It is generally considered to be a feature of literary Chinese rather than of colloquial speech, where the passives formed by *jiao*, *rang* and *gei* (treated below) are the preferred constructions.<fnref n="19" /> However, *bei* is used colloquially too.

<footnote n="18">18. (contd) Another eminent linguist, Gao Mingkai takes the rather unusual position of claiming that there is no passive form in Chinese, all verbs being "middle voice" since they do not need a subject (v. *Hanyu Yufa Lun*, Kexue, 1957, p.202).</footnote>

<footnote n="19">19. Several Linguists share this view, e.g., Li Shuxiang (1981:268, 405), Wang Huan (1957:33), Wang Liaoyi (1957:112), Liang Donghan (1960:75), Guo Derun (1981:30) and Zhang Zhigong (1957:92).</footnote>

<footnote>Liang Donghan in particular claims that only the *bei* ... *suo* construction is exclusively literary, and that *bei* is found colloquially even though it's not as popular as *jiao*, *rang* and *gei*.</footnote>
Although the *bei* passive may not be typical of most varieties of colloquial speech, it is on the other hand freely used by that section of the populace which has had access to higher education: academics, university students and intellectuals. Thus apart from its use in the more formal register of news broadcasting, the educated elite in China use it colloquially and it is considered to serve as a sign of their education.<fnref n="20" />

### 1.1.2 Semantic Analysis

The evidence for considering the *bei* passive to be a passive of adversity is now presented: The traditional *bei* passive always expresses an unfortunate state of affairs for the subject, when referring to a person. To demonstrate this, we should address ourselves to the question of whether or not predicates of good fortune as well as those neutral with respect to this feature can occur in the passive. As we have seen there have been many conflicting views on this point. In fact, a semantic transformation takes place upon the use of such predicates: When predicates of good fortune are combined with the *bei* passive, the newly arisen state of affairs comes to be interpreted as an unfortunate one for the subject-undergoer. Take for example, the passive event which is

<footnote n="20">20. This was the linguistic situation as I found it during my field trip to China in 1980-81 when I stayed at Peking University. My main informants and teachers at the university agreed that *bei* was used in university circles as a sign of learnedness and thus of the social status attached to it and that it wasn't likely to be heard in peasant or worker milieus. As a result, I was readily able to find informants who had intuitions about the use of this construction. This was important for ascertaining the unique semantic features of the *bei* passive as opposed to those of the other colloquial passives, since these informants used the whole range of passive constructions as opposed to most people who would only use the purely colloquial passives formed by *jiao*, *rang* and *gei*.</footnote>
expressed using the verb *biaoyang* 'praise':

17. <u>Wo zuotian bei laoshi hao-haor de biaoyang-le.</u>
I yesterday BEI teacher well ADV praise:COM

This particular instance of the *bei* passive can either be
interpreted ironically as "Yesterday I was praised resoundingly by
the teacher. - She gave me 4 out of 10" or "She told me I'd
completely misunderstood the point" or as belonging to the context
where the person praised finds such an event exceedingly
embarrassing.

This adversative interpretation resulting from expression
by means of a passive construction is clearly the converse to that
of an active form construction which does not undergo such a
semantic transformation:

18. <u>Laoshi zuotian biaoyang - le wo.</u>
teacher yesterday praise : COM I
Yesterday the teacher praised me.

Not only is this the case for predicates which
intrinsically denote fortunate events (in terms of the societal
consensus) but also for what can be called 'neutral' events:

19. <u>Zheiben zazhi bei ta fan - le jiye.</u>
this:CL magazine BEI he turn : COM several pages
This magazine was glanced through by him (to my annoyance).

The latter example has the implication that whoever glanced through
the magazine, perhaps flipping through a few pages in a casual way,
shouldn't have done so. Thus the event is viewed as causing an
undesirable state of affairs for the 'owner' of the magazine. This
adversative implication is not a feature of possible active counterparts, for example, the intentional _ba_ construction:

20. Ta ba zazhi fan le ji ye.
he BA magazine turn COM several pages
He glanced through the magazine.

The Linguistics Institute (Yuyansuo) (1953:30) also remark upon the 'changed' meaning of some neutral predicates in the passive, without committing themselves definitively to any viewpoint:

Wo xie zi [I am writing characters] cannot be changed into Zi bei wo xie le [The characters were written by me] because 'write' cannot express harm, unhappiness or unwillingness with respect to 'characters'.

Some other verbs denoting fortunate events such as _ai_ 'love' and _qin_ 'kiss' need both a clear context and much verbal modification to form acceptable _bei_ passives, as simply the verb plus the aspect marker _le_ is insufficient to meet other semantic requirements such as that of completiveness (discussed in 1.3) or "transitive action" (1.4), let alone that of expressing adversity. Thus there are no Chinese _bei_ passive equivalents of the English _be_ passives "Xiao Mei was loved (kissed) by Zhang San" as demonstrated by the unacceptability of (21):

21. *Xiao Mei bei Zhang San ai (qin) - le.
(name) BEI (name) love (kiss) : COM

Once the adverse state of affairs for the subject-undergoer is made explicit by either a more complex predicate or by the given context, the _bei_ passive becomes acceptable:
22. Xiao Mei bei Zhang San ai de budeliao.
(name) BEI (name) love EXT extremely

Xiao Mei 'suffered' Zhang San loving her to the point of desperation.

23. Xiao Mei zhen de bu xihuan ta, you bei ta qin - le.
(name) really not like him, again BEI he kiss :COM

Xiao Mei really can't stand him, but she was kissed by him again. [e.g. She suffered from being kissed by her uncle who she dislikes intensely.]

The last example belongs to a context where Xiao Mei cannot avoid being kissed, for example, one where the protagonist steals a kiss from her or where social obligation requires relatives to kiss as a formal greeting or show of affection (although the latter is an unlikely event in traditional Chinese society where kissing was never used as a form of greeting between relatives, and this largely remains the situation today).

a. Critique of the Verb Classification Method

This evidence shows that verbs cannot be classified into 'fortunate' and 'unfortunate' ones in order to predict the acceptability of *bei* sentences. The latter task may only be achieved by searching for the semantic 'rules' which the *bei* passive encodes as its grammatical meaning. Moreover, 'neutral' verbs as foreshadowed above follow the same pattern of interpretation. In the latter category we will examine some verbs of perception and cognition as well as verbs of giving and taking to show that their semantic behaviour is similarly only predicted and adequately accounted for by the adversative restriction on the *bei* passive, as opposed to being able to be predicted by the verb classification method or by a Case Grammar analysis.
Shuo, 'to speak' is a seemingly 'neutral' verb, yet once it is encoded by the <u>bei</u> passive, the whole predicate comes to be interpreted as 'to talk about someone to their detriment'. Again much verbal modification is needed to make the state of affairs unambiguously adversative:

24. *Mali bei ren shuo - le.
(name) BEI people speak : COM

25. Mali bei ren shuo de bu hao yise.
(name) BEI people speak EXT embarrassed
Mary was embarrassed by people talking about her.

The use of <u>bei</u> in (25) does not exclude the possibility of the agent ('other people') saying nice things about Mary or even praising her. The crucial interpretation is that it is clearly an unpleasant state of affairs which results for Mary when <u>bei</u> is used to express this event.

Verbs of perception and cognition such as <u>zhidao</u> 'know' <u>tingjian</u> 'hear' and <u>kanjian</u> 'see' undergo the same semantic transformation in the <u>bei</u> passive:

26. Neijian shi bei Li Si <u>zhidao</u> - le.
that:CL matter BEI (name) know : COM
That matter was found out about by Li Si to my misfortune. (I didn't want him to know about it.)

27. Gangcai shuo de hua bei Xing Furen de yatou <u>tingjian-le</u>.
just speak REL word BEI (name) GEN maid hear : COM
What (we) just said was overheard by Madam Xing's maid to our misfortune.
(We didn't want anyone to hear our conversation.)
28. Mali bei ren kanjian - le.

(name) BEI people see : COM

Mary was seen by somebody to her misfortune.
(She didn't want anyone to see her there.)

In each case, it is clearly an unfortunate state of affairs which comes about, this interpretation contrasting sharply to those of the corresponding active sentences which are purely neutral in implication. The Linguistics Institute (1953:30) points out that in examples of the *bei* passive with 'hear' the subject is definitely "not willing" for anyone else to listen in, and Li and Thompson (1981:495) similarly observe that

[V]erbs of perception or cognition ... do not convey pejorative meaning by themselves or in nonpassive sentences ... The *bei* constructions containing such verbs, however, have implications of adversity.

Li and Thompson's remark is confined as we can see to verbs of perception and cognition, although they recognize that the "major use of the *bei* construction is to signal adversity", while the Linguistics Institute are of the opinion that this "traditional usage" has been destroyed. Contrasting to these two viewpoints, it has been shown in this analysis that not only 'neutral' verbs of cognition and perception have the implication of adversity in the *bei* construction but also predicates inherently denoting fortunate events. Moreover, this grammaticalised meaning of adversity is constant for all verb types upon forming acceptable *bei* passives, further evidence of this being the verbs of 'giving'.

If the *bei* passive is a passive of adversity, it might be expected that events of giving are proscribed. This is indeed the prima facie case with the paradigm verb *gei* 'give':
29. *Mali bei ta gei - le liangben shu le.
(name) BEI he give:COM two:CL book INC

Once again, the English _be_ passive "Mary was given two books by him" cannot be translated by a _bei_ passive even in the context where the two books are ones Mary didn't want to be given. Furthermore, the semantic principle on which the exclusion of 'giving' is based is still actively operating in colloquial speech.

Despite the exclusion of (29) with the 'recipient' as syntactic subject, if the "direct object" of a ditransitive verb of giving or transferral is made into the syntactic subject of the passive and provided that it can be interpreted as a possession, then a semantically well-formed passive is produced: For example, if the two books of (29) happened to be 'mine', then an acceptable _bei_ sentence results:

30. Wo liangben shu bei ta gei - le Mali.
my two CL book BEI he gave : COM Mary
Two of my books were given away to Mary by him.

However, the event expressed is no longer one of giving but rather one of loss for the owner of the books, even though the paradigm verb 'give' has been used. Clearly we cannot write a rule to the effect that verbs of giving are proscribed from use in the passive. Once again, it is only the complete meaning of the syntactic construction which allows us to decide whether or not a particular sentence conforms to the semantic requirements of the _bei_ passive. Thus, the first condition controlling the co-occurrence of verbs of giving with the passive is that the event is interpreted as one of loss not of gain. If an event with such a verb can never be interpreted as one of loss when it occurs in the passive, that is,
it does not undergo the kind of semantic transformation exemplified
by (30), then it will be unacceptable. This point is exemplified by
(31) where the predicate retains its meaning of "gain" within the
overall sense of the sentence and so does not conform to the
requirements of the _bei_ passive:

31. *Jiangxuejin bei ta de - le.
    scholarship BEI she get:COM

However, the same example can be used in conjunction with a context
that clearly specifies an adverse state of affairs in the form of a
loss for the person who wanted to win the scholarship but didn't end
up doing so. Thus it needs to be part of a larger syntactic
expression before it is deemed acceptable:

32. Jiangxuejin wo mei dedao, BEI ta de - le.
    scholarship I not get BEI she get:COM

As for the scholarship, I didn't win it, it was won by
her.

Here, the topic and elided subject of the _bei_ passive, 'scholarship'
is not the semantic undergoer (or 'sufferer') but the person who
imagines herself as the holder or future 'owner' of the scholarship:
'me'. The resultant state of affairs is construed as a loss for
this person (2.2.2).

In general therefore, verbs of gain and giving are not
compatible with the _bei_ passive unless there is the kind of
contextual modification as in (32), giving the overall
interpretation of loss. When the overall interpretation of the
event remains that of the subject receiving or gaining something,
such as in the English _be_ passive "Mary was bought a book by Li Si",
bei cannot be used:

33. *Mali bei Li Si mai le yi ben shu. (name) BEI (name) buy COM one CL book

I believe that the verb classification method can consequently be rejected as a method of analysis for the *bei* passive as the evidence presented here has shown that it is inadequate to account for all the facts uncovered in the data.

b. Critique of the Case Grammar Approach

The fact that the recipient seems to be excluded from occurring as subject of the *bei* passive might however seem to favour a Case Grammar approach whereby a rule is written to the effect that the Benefactive Case is proscribed from the position of syntactic subject, with only the Neutral or Objective Case (associated with "ditransitive" verbs of giving and gain) being permissible. This analysis is in fact upheld by Chu (1974:449-50) who simultaneously proposes a qualified viewpoint on the adversity question:

> [T]he Benefactive case cannot be subjectivalized in a passive construction. This inability for the Benefactive to become the surface subject of a passive sentence may very well be one of the reasons why the passive construction mostly, though not exclusively, expresses an unfavourable occurrence on the part of the surface subject.

I would suggest that the converse of this explanation is applicable: the *bei* passive is a construction exclusively expressing adversative events which happen to the syntactic subject when it refers to a person, accounting for the fact that 'recipients' are generally excluded from this position, (provided that 'recipient' is semantically defined as a person who comes to have something and this is viewed as something good).
Moreover, "Benefactive", described purely in syntactic and formal terms cannot adequately describe the facts apparent in the data given above either: Even if we reclassified the semantic undergoer of (30) - 'me' - (in "Two of _my_ books were given away to Mary by him") as the Locative Case as Chu does for the passive subjects of verbs of loss and taking away (1974:448), a Case Grammar treatment still fails to capture the generalization which could account for all the facts rather than for just some of them. Chu formalizes the structural properties of the surface subject in his conclusion (1974:451) as:

(2.4) The claim that a passive sentence only expresses an unfortunate event is false. But it seems true that some favourable events may not be put in the passive because an NP in the Benefactive Case cannot be subjectivalized.

(2.5) An NP in either the Neutral, the Dative, or the Locative Case may be subjectivalized in a Chinese passive sentence when it has more than two cases associated with it. But the Dative Case takes precedence over the Locative in subjectivalization. 21

Chu's treatment does however clarify the fact that which entities can be subjectivalized by the passive is not determined by the direct object/indirect object dichotomy: According to his analysis, it is only one kind of indirect object - the Benefactive - which is proscribed from subject position. What could be considered as two other kinds of 'indirect objects' or at least 'non-direct objects', the Locative Case and the Dative case, are shown by Chu to be possible in the _bei_ passive (1974:448, Chu's numbering and

<footnote n="21">21. Chu defines his cases in terms of Fillmore (1968) and with reference to Y.C. Li (1971). Here the Neutral or Objective Case refers to what is known in more traditional style analyses as the 'direct object'.</footnote>
translation):

## Locative Case

1.29b' Wo bei ta na(zou) le nei liang ben shu le.

'I was taken (away) those two books by him'

'I had those two books taken (away) by him.

## Dative Case

1.28a' Wo bei ta wen le xuduo wenti le.

'I was asked (to my annoyance) many questions by him'

The counterevidence for Chu's Case Grammar analysis is found in examples such as (34) where the syntactic subject can be defined as being in the Benefactive Case according to the definition used by Chu which derives from Y.C. Li's *An Investigation of Case in Chinese Grammar* (Seton Hall, 1971): "the NP in the Benefactive Case may usually have the preposition *gei* 'for < to give' associated with it" (1974:449, Footnote 14). Consider (34) which is the counter example:

34. *Mali bei Zhang San chuanran - le nueji.*

(name) BEI (name) infect : COM cholera

Mary was infected with (was given) cholera by Zhang San.

The syntactic evidence for classifying the NP "Mali" as Benefactive Case is found in the active form *ba* construction where 'Mali' appears as the syntactic object of the preposition *gei*:

35. *Zhang San ba nueji chuanran gei Mali.*

(name) BA cholera infect GEI Mary

Zhang San passed on cholera to Mary.
I would further like to point out that neither can this event be reclassified as one of 'loss' or 'giving away' as in the previous examples (30) and (32) with verbs of giving and transferring. Secondly, _bei_ sentences of the following type are minimally acceptable for some speakers, with the verb _gei_ 'give':

36. ?Mali bei Zhang San gei-le yibei dujiu.
(name) BEI (name) give:COM one:CL poison:wine
Mary was given a cup of poisoned wine by Zhang San.

The subjects of both these examples (34) and (36) can be defined as the Benefactive Case according to the formal definition that Chu uses, yet they nonetheless form acceptable _bei_ sentences contrary to his prediction. The explanation for this is that both conform to the semantic requirement of conveying an adversative state of affairs for the subject. In contrast to this, sentence (30) is unacceptable due to its not conforming to this requirement through the encoding of the event of giving two books to the subject, Mary. This situation is difficult to interpret as adversative, whereas in (36) the giving of a cup of poisonous wine to Mary, unaware of the hidden contents, is quite distinctly so. This is the generalization which Chu's analysis fails to capture. In fact, the argument for the presence of this feature in the semantic structure of the passive is finally refuted by Chu (1974:451).

In contrast to events of receiving and gain, events of taking away and loss for the underlying semantic undergoer (including verbs of giving whose interpretation in the passive comes to be one of giving away) are highly compatible with it:

38. Wo de zixingche BEI xiao tour tou-zou - le.
I GEN bicycle BEI thief steal:away:COM
My bicycle was stolen by a thief (to my detriment).
38. Zheixie zhengui de yishupin bei ta sui-sui
this:CL precious REL objets:d'art he casually
bian-bian de song - le ren.

ADV present:COM others

These invaluable objets d'art were just given away by him
as he pleased to others (as presents) (to my detriment
[that is, the speaker's detriment] or my family's
detriment in the case where these objets d'art have been
handed down from one generation to the next by my family).

1.1.3 Imperatives and the Passive

The case of passive-form imperatives reinforces the
argument in favour of postulating 'adversity' as an invariant
feature of the _bei_ passive.

Wang Huan (1957:42) is of the belief that the passive is
not to be found occurring in the imperative form:

_Ba_ sentences may be used in imperative ones
whereas _bei_ cannot. Imperatives (or sentences
conveying suggestions) are sentences whose
agentive characteristics are very strong, and
thus are not compatible with passive
characteristics.

There are several different syntactic constructions for
expressing commands, requests, exhortations and advice in Chinese as
in any language. Looking at only the imperative constructions, the
most basic command in Chinese may be expressed by the verb form
alone:

39. Zou!
Leave!

Secondly, a command may be expressed by the verb phrase
in conjunction with a rhetorical particle occurring sentence-finally
such as _a_ which expresses in addition the urgency of the command
(cf. Chao 1968:804). [The rhetorical particle _a_ is realized by its
allomorph _ya_ in (40) below.]:
40. Kuai jiao ta jinlai ya.
quick tell him enter RP

Quickly go and tell him to come in!

Thirdly, it is quite common to use the imperative
construction with the pronoun 'you' retained as the subject:

41. Nimen dou zou!
you:PL all go

Leave (all of you)!

In accordance with Wang Huan's observation, we would not
predict that the passive could be used in the imperative form. The
subject of the passive is the undergoer of the event and as such
does not meet the main requirement of the imperative that the
subject be the potential agent of some action. This prediction is
borne out by the example in (42):

42. \*Bei ta da-le.
BEI she hit:COM

Contrasting to this, in English, *be* passives can be used in imperatives in a very restricted way such as in advertising language since they are not subject to the adversative constraint which makes the Chinese passive even less semantically plausible in imperative form. The Chinese passive as an imperative would have this semantic effect if usable: Do something to cause misfortune to befall you!²² On the other hand, the hoardings for a circus might use the *be* passive to advertise the show. Note that the *be* passive in

22. However, note that this kind of meaning *is* conveyed by curses expressed in the form of imperative constructions, as in Polish and Russian, not to mention English: "Go to hell!", (contd.)
positive imperative form seems to be restricted to co-occurrence
with verbs of feelings:

43. Be amazed by the two-headed llama!

Be stunned by the spectacular feats of the acrobats!

Be dazzled by the daring dancers in the grand finale!!!

The _get_ passive in imperative form is however a common
feature of both colloquial speech and advertising language with _Get_
_rocked!_ (an advertising slogan commonly used for rock'n'roll
concerts); _Get wet!_ (an LP title) and on the less savoury side,
expletives such as _Get stuffed!_

Wang Huan's statement is not completely correct however,
as it is possible to use the _bei_ passive in _negative_ imperatives.
(see also Li and Thompson 1981:503 and Chu 1974:440,444).. This is
the case too for the _be_ passive in English which proves to be
unrestricted in its usage in the negative imperative.

The negative imperative of the passive is not however
merely the converse of the affirmative in meaning. Rather it serves
the purpose of a warning:

44. Don't be deceived by appearances!

45. Don't be shocked when I tell you this.

On the other hand, due to its semantic structure, the _get_ passive
(v. Chapter 4 below) can often be semantically awkward in the

22. (contd.)

"Go and break your neck!" etc. (Anna Wierzbicka-personal
communication) There are some curses in English which take
the form of passives expressed in the subjunctive mood: "You
be damned!" "May your family be cursed for the next ten
generations!" The latter are not passive imperatives, however.
negative imperative given the implied causal involvement of the
subject in the passive event. If the context is made clear however,
then the _get_ passive is acceptable too in the negative imperative
form:

46. Don't get deceived by appearances!

47. Don't get arrested at the demonstration.

The negative imperative in Chinese takes either the form
_BIE + VP_ or _BU YAO + VP_ (cf. Ding Shengshu 1979:212). (Note that
_bie_ is a phonetic contraction of _bu yao_ and is the preferred form in
Northern Chinese):

48. Bie (bu yao) ku-le!
NEG IMP (not want) cry:COM
Don't cry!

A third form, similar to the third affirmative imperative
construction described above, retains the second person pronoun in
its structure: NI(MEN) + BIE + VP:

49. Nimen bie chao a!
you:PL don't be:noisy RP
Don't be noisy, you lot!

Hence the negative imperative form of the passive is
BIE (BU YAO) + BEI + NP + VP:

50. Bie bei renjia pian-le.
don't BEI people deceive COM
Don't be deceived by others.
In English, it is clear that the _be_ passive serves as a warning when used in the negative imperative form, provided we agree to describe warnings as speech acts which are used to alert others to the possibility of events of an undesirable nature befalling them if they carry out a certain action: Desirable events are thus not compatible with the _be_ passive warning unless used ironically:

51. *Don't be given too many presents.*

52. *Don't be awarded first prize.*

This provides us with the explanation as to why the _bei_ passive is suited to be used as a warning expressed in the syntactic form of a negative imperative, because of its component of adversity.

In conclusion, I would like to put forward the view that only a semantically based analysis can predict which occurrences of the _bei_ passive are acceptable. Neither the verb classification approach nor Case Grammar can successfully achieve this. The semantic feature of adversity is encoded in the representation for the passive as the speaker's view: _I'm thinking of it as something bad for person A._
## 1.2 THE SEMANTIC CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SUBJECT

> The subject cannot be indefinite in the passive.

> - Lu Shuxiang (1941:61)

A consideration of the semantic characteristics of the entity acting as the subject (a notion which was defined in Section 0.1) is a necessary preliminary to the following discussion on the semantic property of completiveness.

Regardless of whether or not the subject is morphologically marked for definiteness in the passive construction, the entity it refers to is always an 'identifiable' one for the speaker. Informally characterised, 'identifiability' of the subject means that the speaker is able to readily 'bring to mind' or think of the entity which is designated by the subject noun phrase.

This is a generalization which I believe makes a stronger claim than that defining the nature of the subject in terms of 'definiteness' as does Lu Shuxiang (v. quote above) since the latter definition necessarily restricts itself to grammatical definiteness, and is thus less encompassing than one in semantic terms. In the non-complex terms of the semantic representation, it is defined in this way:

> Thinking of this person (or thing),

> I say...

> where the person (or thing) is the entity designated by the syntactic subject of the passive and 'I' refers to the speaker. I also believe that this formalisation is more precise and therefore preferable to Y.C. Li's characterisation of the subject (1976:34) in terms of 'pre-existence' - a term which is more metaphysical than accurate:
[B]ei strongly suggests that a certain pre-existing object is to be dealt with in some way ... it implies the understanding of an object before the act.

This feature is not unique to the *bei* passive however. It conforms to the general constraint described by Chao (1968:76-78) to the effect that in Chinese, preverbal nouns are always definite, understanding 'definite' in terms of the definition adopted in the analysis here, that is "able to be identified by you and me." It would be productive at this point to examine what are the other properties of the subject in the passive apart from it designating an identifiable entity. Chu's analysis of the *bei* passive in terms of cases which are permissible in subject position is thus highly relevant to our discussion and semantic characterisation of the subject.

As we saw in the preceding section where case roles were evaluated with respect to the question of adversity, according to Chu's analysis, the Benefactive Case is prohibited from subjectivization and the Dative and Locative Cases are only permissible when other associated cases are present. In contradistinction to the claims made in Chu's Case Grammar analysis, I claim that the semantic generalization which holds with regard to the nature of the subject is one where only entities of which it can be predicated

Something happened to this person (or thing) X:

can occur in subject position. In combination with the other semantic components of the representation, I believe that both a larger set of data can be accounted for and in a more systematic way than when a characterisation in terms of case is used. Chu notes in passing that neither the Instrumental nor the Factitive Case may
occur in subject position (1974:450). No explanation is offered,
yet, there are sound semantic reasons as to why both these cases are
typically not to be found in the passive as its subject. Moreover,
the semantic formula as a whole reflects these reasons in predicting
that instruments and factitive case nouns cannot act as subjects,
and does so in a much more accurate way.

Despite the fact that an instrument may be thought of as
having something done to it by the agent as part of carrying out an
action, it may not be used as the subject, as neither does it refer
to the entity which is affected by the adverse state of affairs nor
is it the topic.

53. *Daor bei ta sha-si - le ren.
knife BEI he stab:kill: COM somebody

54. *Shitou bei ta da-sui - le chuanghu.
stone BEI he hit:smash: COM window

Both the subject nouns may occur as the syntactic object of the
coverb (or preposition) yòng 'with' in other sentences which,
according to Li's definition, determines that following nouns are in
the Instrumental case (1971:20-21). Note that yòng is also used as
a verb meaning 'use' as in Nǐ yong gao, wo yong tieqiao. "You use the
pickaxe and I'll use the shovel."

55. Ta yong daor kai men.
he with knife open door
He opens the door with a knife.

56. Ta yong shitou da-sui - le chuanghu.
he with stone hit:smash: COM window
He smashed the window with a stone.
Instrumental phrases can only co-occur with the passive as part of the predicate, following *bei*:

57. Chuanghu bei ta <u>yong shitou</u> da-sui - le. window BEI he with stone hit:smash:COM The window was smashed by him <u>with a stone</u>.

The Factitive case pertains to nouns which are the cognate objects of certain 'intransitive' action verbs in Chinese. Fillmore defines it as "the case of the object or being resulting from the action or state identified by the verb, or understood as a part of the meaning of the verb" (1968:25).

In Chinese, nouns in the Factitive case are found as the second member of verb-object compounds which denote activities:

<table><thead><tr><th>VERB</th><th>OBJECT</th><th>MEANING OF COMPOUND</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>xie</td><td>zi</td><td>'write'</td></tr><tr><td>write</td><td>character</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>xi</td><td>zao</td><td>'bathe'</td></tr><tr><td>wash</td><td>bathe</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>pao</td><td>bu</td><td>'run'</td></tr><tr><td>run</td><td>step</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>da</td><td>zhang</td><td>'wage war'</td></tr><tr><td>strike</td><td>war</td><td></td></tr></tbody></table>

As such, it is not possible for the object noun of the compound to become the subject of the passive due to the constraint on the subject explicated above: The speaker is unable to 'think of' this entity and then predicate something of it since it cannot even be identified as an individual entity at the moment of speaking. The object noun is semantically inseparable from the verb with which it forms the larger expression referring to an activity:
58. *Zao bei wo xi - le.
bath BEI I wash:COM

59. *Zhang bei tamen da - le.
war BEI they strike: COM

Secondly, in denoting activities, these compounds do not occur in the predicate of the *bei* passive as they are unable to encode completiveness (1.3), not to mention an adverse state of affairs for the object noun that has been 'detached' and placed in subject position.

The full semantic representation can account for both these aspects of meaning which an analysis purely in terms of Case Grammar is unable to do. Secondly, Chu's exclusion of the Factitive Case from subject position in the passive cannot explain the following kind of data:

60. *Zi bei wo xie - le.
character BEI I write:COM

61. Zi bei wo xie-huai - le.
character BEI I write:bad:COM

The characters were written badly by me.

According to a Case Grammar analysis, the subject of (61) would be in the Factitive Case as it is in (60), since the entity referred to "results from the action" of the verb, yet only (60) is unacceptable rather than both as the Case Grammar analysis would predict. Semantically analysed, the reason for the acceptability of the passive in (61) is that the 'characters' are 'identifiable'. They are ones which are already written at the moment of speaking and thus conform to the constraint on the subject while enabling the
speaker to predicate something more about them: that they were
written badly. Syntactically analysed this is due to the use of the
resultative verb compound xie-huai 'write badly' which means that
the subject zi 'characters' is no longer the 'cognate object' of xie
'write'. The Case Grammar analysis makes no provision for this
however, either in semantic or syntactic terms.

Secondly, there is another group of verb-object compounds
which form idiomatic expressions, denoting different kinds of
actions. As the verb and object work together syntactically as one
unit, identically to the V-O compounds denoting activities, they
cannot be separated through being moved into different syntactic
positions:

<table><thead><tr><th>VERB</th><th>+</th><th>OBJECT</th><th>IDIOMATIC MEANING</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td colspan="4"><u>da-erguang</u></td></tr><tr><td>hit</td><td>+</td><td>a slap to the ear</td><td>'box the ears'</td></tr><tr><td colspan="4"><u>jiang-jun</u></td></tr><tr><td>check</td><td>+</td><td>army</td><td>'put someone in check (chess)' or<br>'put someone on the spot'</td></tr><tr><td colspan="4"><u>kou-maozi</u></td></tr><tr><td>cover</td><td>+</td><td>cap</td><td>'put a label on someone' or<br>'call someone a name'</td></tr></tbody></table>

When an idiomatic expression forms part of the predicate
of the passive, there are no semantic complications since they refer
to actions and not to activities as do the V-O compounds above. The
idiom <u>kou-maozi</u> 'put a label on someone' is exemplified by (62)
below:
62. Wenge qijian Deng Xiaoping BEI Si Ren Bang kou-shang-le
C.R. during (name) BEI Gang of Four put:on : COM
yiding zouzi pai de maozi.
one:CL capitalist: REL cap
school

During the Cultural Revolution, Deng Xiaoping was
labelled a capitalist roader by the Gang of Four.

However, when the object noun **maozi** 'cap' of the idiom **kou maozi** 'label' is placed in subject position, no interpretation of the passive is possible:

63. *Deng Xiaoping de maozi BEI Si Ren Bang kou-shang-le.
(name) GEN cap BEI Gang of Four put:on : COM

These idiomatic compound verbs are discussed further in Chapter 3 on
the Adversative *Bei* Passive of Bodily Effect (the passive with a
'retained object').

In conclusion, the subject of the *bei* passive must be the
true semantic undergoer, a feature which is formalised by this part
of the semantic representation for the general passive:

Thinking of this person (thing) X,

I say:

Something happened to X:

The argument for the completiveness of the event is put forward in
the next section.

********
## 1.3 COMPLETIVENESS

It was pointed out in section 0.2 that the morpheme *bei* of the passive construction can be etymologically traced back to a verb which had the two distinct meanings of 'cover' and 'suffer'. Furthermore, both these meanings stemmed from the even earlier meaning of 'put on the body' (Wang Li 1957:10).

This original grammatical function was lost in the course of time as *bei* can no longer be used as a main verb in Modern Chinese, despite the claim to the contrary that *bei* has never lost its "pure verbal force" made by the grammarian Gao Mingkai (1957:207). That *bei* no longer functions as a verb is however not only supported by other grammarians such as T.N. Nikitina (1958:220) and Zhao Enzhu (1956:48) but also to be observed from example (64):

64. *Mali bei-le.

Mary BEI:COM

Only one of the two earlier verbal meanings - 'cover' - is preserved in nouns and compounds of present-day usage:

65. *beizi* 'quilt'

*beiru* 'bedding'

The second meaning of 'suffer' is the precursor of the use of *bei* in the modern-day passive, the development of which is outlined in section 0.2 above.

The loss of the verbal function of *bei* contrasts with the situation for the three purely colloquial passives formed by the morphemes *jiao*, *rang* and *gei*, the latter all still being used as main verbs in other non-passive constructions with the meaning of
'tell', 'let' and 'give' respectively. Secondly, **jiao** and **rang** are
also used as causative verbs 'make' and 'have' (someone do
something)', more on which follows below in Chapters 1 and 2 of Part
II, while the morpheme **gei** is also used to form dative and
benefactive constructions, the subject of Part III. Note that the
following analysis of the syntax of the **bei** passive is intended to
include **rang** and **jiao**.

Regardless of whether we consider the morpheme <u>bei</u> to be
a coverb (Li and Thompson 1981:492); an auxiliary verb (Linguistics
Insititute 1953:30) or a preposition (Lü Shuxiang 1980:57), a
further feature grammaticalized by the passive construction is that
of completiveness, specifically the completion of the passive event.
There are different syntactic strategies available for achieving
this semantic end, each being discussed in turn below:

1.3.1 The Completive Aspect Marker -<u>le</u>:

The major syntactic strategy for signalling the
completion of an event is the use of the completive aspect marker
-<u>le</u>. In this respect, the <u>bei</u> passive resembles the causative <u>ba</u>
construction as both encode the feature of completiveness as a
semantic invariable.<sup>23</sup> Compare the <u>bei</u> constructions in (66) and

23. Here the usage of the *bei* passive and the *ba* construction as complete utterances and not as subordinate clauses is intended.

Strangely, Nikitina claims that aspectual marking is only
obligatory for the **jiao** and **rang** passives and not for **bei**
(1958:219):

Peculiar to **jiao** and **rang** passives, an aspectual
indicator is obligatory for the predicate: the predicate
must be a verb in a perfective or resultative aspect...
For the **bei** passive, this marker is not obligatory.

In contradistinction to Nikitina, I claim that all three
passive constructions encode completiveness.
(67) and similarly, the _ba_ constructions of (68) and (69):

66. *Ta bei Li si da.
he BEI (name) hit

67. Ta bei Li Si da -le.
he BEI (name) hit:COM
He was hit by Li Si.

The Causative BA Construction:

NOUN PHRASE
 Times
(Behind)
(undergoer)

BA

NOUN PHRASE
 Times
(Behind)
(undergoer)

VERB PHRASE
 Times
(Behind)
(undergoer)

68. *Li Si ba ta da.
(name) BA him hit

69. ?Li Si ba ta da-le.
(name) BA him hit:COM

Li Si hit him.

The _ba_ construction also features the property of a change of state for the undergoer which explains why (69) is not as semantically well-formed as (70) as the resultant state for the undergoer, _ta_ 'he' is explicit in (70) - he became injured - whereas it is not in (69):²⁴

70. Li Si ba ta da-huai le.
(name) BA him hit:damage COM

He was injured through Li Si hitting him.

24. This feature of the _ba_ construction is treated in more depth in my Honours thesis (unpublished) "Semantics of some causatives in Chinese and English", ANU, 1978, pp.17-27.
Unlike the *ba* construction, the *bei* passive does not grammaticalize an observable change of state for the undergoer. Instead it singles out the feature of adversative effect on the subject, explicated in section 1.1.

71. Mali bei Li Si hen-si - le.
(name)BEI (name) hate:die:COM
Mary was intensely hated by Li Si.

Being hated by Li Si is an adverse state of affairs for Mary, but not one that causes a change of state in her.

The minimum syntactic requirement to express completeness in the *bei* passive is thus the verb and the completive aspect marker -le.

The particle *le* forms a large number of different aspectual constructions, and as its use in the passive has been given varying interpretations, I will digress briefly to point out these different semantic functions of *le* and then argue for recognising its use in the passive as a syntactic exponent of the completive aspect.

It is generally recognised that *le* has two main grammatical functions. Occurring sentence-finally in active form constructions it signals the arising of a new state of affairs. Thus, in this function it has been described variously as an inception marker (Lu 1975:54); an inchoative marker (Teng 1973:14) or the 'change of state' *le* (Teng 1974:89).²⁵

25. Only constructions where *le* co-occurs with transitive verbs are under consideration here. It also forms other inchoative constructions with stative verbs: e.g. *Tian hei le* "The sky is growing dark" and *Xian le!* "It's too salty".
72. Ta zhidao zheijian shiqing le.
she know this: CL matter INC

She knows this now. (This is a new state of affairs, it being implied that she didn't know it before.)

The sentential use of _le_ in (72) contrasts with its use as a verbal suffix indicating the 'perfective' or 'completed' aspect, this being the function of _-le_ in the passive and in the next example of an active form construction:

73. Ta zhidao-le zheijian shiqing.
she know : COM this: CL matter

She knew this.

In (73), unlike (72) there is no implication that the subject _still_ knows this piece of information, as the sentence refers to an event which happened in the past and does not cause a state of affairs to arise which continues on into the present. Sentential _le_ on the other hand does entail the latter in its structural meaning.<fnref n="26" />

Apart from occurring in different syntactic positions, the two kinds of _le_ may also be distinguished by the methods of negation that are applied to the constructions they form: Verbal _-le_ denoting completiveness may only be negated by the negative marker

<footnote n="26">26 Verbal _-le_ is generally known as the 'perfective' _le_ (Teng 1974:89) or the aspect marker _le_ (e.g. Lu 1975:54). Y.R. Chao was probably the first to suggest the English terminology of the verb suffix _le_ vs sentential _le_. He also pointed out that the former would normally be translated by the preterite in English while the latter would use the perfect tense (1968:798), which jars slightly with the currently vogue term of "perfective" aspect marker for the former and not for the latter. To avoid confusion, I call the verbal suffix _-le_ the 'completive' aspect marker (COM) and sentential _le_, the inchoative aspect marker (INC). Note that Li and Thompson (1982) call verbal _-le_, "perfective" and sentential _le_ the "perfect".</footnote>
mei (you) with -le being simultaneously deleted. This negates the
assumption that a certain event ever took place, the relationship
evident between (74) and (75):

74. Ta mai-le shu.
he buy:COM book
He bought books.

75. Ta mei you mai shu.
he NEG₂ buy book
He hasn't bought books.

Sentence (76) using another negative marker *bu* is not a
contradiction of (74):

76. Ta bu mai shu.
he NEG₁ buy book
He didn't (want to) buy books/He wouldn't buy books.

Only (75) can serve to contradict the statement made in (74) as when
*bu* is used as a negative marker with animate subjects the
construction expresses the subject's not wanting to do something and
not that the event did not happen. (cf. Chao 1968:782; Teng 1974:86
and Li and Thompson 1981:423) This explains why only *bu* can negate
statements about future events (cf. Lu 1980:341), the future
regularly being expressed with the aid of verbs such as *yao* 'want'
and *xiang* 'thinking of' in Chinese and not through morphological
marking on the verb:

77. Ta bu (*mei*) yao qu.
he NEG₁ (*NEG₂*) want go
He doesn't want to go.
Sentential _le_, on the other hand, is negated in an entirely different way. In the negation of verbal _-le_ exemplified by (75) above, _-le_ as we have seen, is suppressed to form the negative with _mei_ (you), both being mutually exclusive constituents. Verbal _-le_ never co- occurs then with its negative marker _mei_ (you), shown by (78):

78. *Ta mei you mai-le shu.
he NEG₂ buy:COM book

Sentential _le_ has its negative counterpart in the choice of two constructions, one with _bu...le_ and the other with _mei...le_. Thus, the negative counterparts of (79)

79. Ta mai shu le.
he buy book INC
He buys books now

could be either (80)

80. Ta bu mai shu le.
he NEG₁ buy book INC
He no longer buys books.

or (81):

81. Ta mei you mai shu le.
he NEG₂ buy book INC

He doesn't buy books anymore, (having stopped at a certain point of time in the past).²⁷

In all these constructions - affirmative and negative - the expression with sentential _le_ refers to the present state of

27. Some of the preceding examples are adapted from Lu (1975); my translations and numbering.
affairs for the subject caused by a past event. In contrast,
constructions with verbal -le express events that have taken place
in the past and imply no effect on the subject's present situation.

Li and Thompson (1981:187) contend that verbal -le does
not express completion but rather that it refers to a bounded event,
viewed in its entirety. Such paraphrasing complicates rather than
explicates. The use of verbal -le is typically in complex
constructions denoting 'events-in-series' such that example (74)
("He bought books") usually does not constitute a complete utterance
in itself until it is expanded into the form of (82):

82. Ta mai-le shu, jiu hui jia.
he buy:COM books, then return home

He bought books, then returned home.

We would expect verbal -le to be heavily used in narratives as is
the preterite tense in English, by which it is usually translated.

The situation is further complicated by the fact that
verbal -le and sentential le together form a third aspectual
construction which serves as a complete utterance on its own:

83. Ta mai-le shu le.
he buy:COM book INC

He has been buying books for a while.

Compare (83) with (74) "He bought books" using verbal -le and (79)
"He buys books now" using sentential le.

Consider these further examples from Chao (1968:799 - my
numbering) which contrast verbal -le with the third construction
containing both verbal and sentential le:

84. Wo jiao-le si-shi nian de shu.
I teach:COM forty year REL book

I taught for forty years (and am now retired).
85. 
Wo jiao-shu jiao - le si-shi nian le.
I teach:book teach:COM forty year INC
I've been teaching for forty years (and still am).

Usually, it is easy to distinguish verbal -le from sentential le as in active constructions such as (74) with a transitive verb and its object, the verbal -le is prevented from occurring at the end of the sentence by the presence of this object, without which it could otherwise be confused with sentential le. (Verbal -le always immediately follows the verb).

The problem is presented by cases with an intransitive action verb as here no postverbal object occurs. Out of context, it is not possible to tell which of the constructions with le such an example belongs to as sentential le is prohibited from immediately following verbal le:

86. 
*Ta lai - le le.
she come : COM INC

Chao observes that "Mandarin always avoids a repetition of the same syllable by way of haplology: -le le → -le" (1968:247) and indeed there is only one possible syntactic form comprising the subject, verb and one single le:

87. 
Ta lai le.
she come ?

Of course, without context this is ambiguous between the readings of "She came", "She's here now" and "she has come".

Consequently, Chao claims ambiguity for the ba construction where the verb typically occurs in sentence final position (1968:247 - my numbering):
88. Ni ba zheige beizi xi-ganjing le.
you BA this:CL cup wash:clean LE

Command: (1) Wash this cup clean!

Statement: (2) You have washed this cup clean.

However, this ambiguity is due to the fact that the imperative may
take the same form as a declarative sentence, retaining the subject
ni 'you' rather than being due to the use of _le_ (1.1.3). Teng
(1973:24) takes the contrary position, claiming unequivocally that
it is verbal _-le_ which is found in the _ba_ construction. Li and
Thompson (1981:297) similarly give the _le_ in this construction one
unambiguous interpretation, but not as verbal _-le_, rather as
sentential _le_, which they describe as expressing the "currently
relevant state" (CRS). This is due to their analysis of the event
depicted in a _ba_ construction such as (88) as not being "bounded ...
temporally, spatially or conceptually" (1981:185 ff.), the
requirements for verbal _-le_ as they see it. Chu concurs with their
viewpoint, analysing it as a 'change of state' _le_ (1974:441).

The function of verbal -le is also viewed by Li and
Thompson as contrasting sharply with that of sentential le. The
"Currently Relevant State" signalled by sentential le is defined by
Li and Thompson in their article specifically dealing with this
aspect marker as "a state of affairs (which) has special current
relevance to some particular Reference Time" (1982:23). Here they
present the five main ways in which this "basic communicative
function" of le is manifested, such as changed state, correction of
a wrong assumption, reporting of "progress so far" and so on
(1982:28).

Returning to the problem of example (88), we find that in
fact, any construction which is verb-final will prove to be
"ambiguous" with respect to which *le* is being employed, at least out of context, with the topic-comment construction, the *ba* construction and most pertinent to the discussion, the *bei* passive all falling into this category.

Li and Thompson (1981:298) claim further that in some cases, a *le* in sentence final position could be expressing the functions of sentential and verbal *-le* simultaneously, that is, it could signify both a bounded event and a currently relevant state (completion of the event and inception of a new state of affairs according to the descriptive terms I have been using). This is in fact the analysis given for the *bei* passive (1981: Chapter 16) for most of the examples:

(2) ta bei jiejie ma LE

3 sg BEI older: scold PFV/CRS
sister

S/He was scolded by (his/her) older sister.

(1981:492 - their numbering and translation)

If we use the recognised method for distinguishing sentential *le* from verbal *-le* - that of pinpointing which of the negative constructions is the correct counterpart<fnref n="28" /> of the *bei* passive - we have to conclude that it is verbal *-le* - the aspect marker of completion - which is involved. The passive in (89) below has its negative counterpart in (90) using the *mei(you)* construction which causes the *-le* of the affirmative passive to be suppressed as explained above and exemplified by the active-form sentences (75) and (78).

<footnote n="28">28. Teng Shou-hsin advocates this method (1973:33).</footnote>
89. Zhang San bei Li Si da le.
(name) BEI (name) hit COM

Zhang San was hit by Li Si.

90. Zhang San mei you bei Li Si da.
(name) NEG₂ BEI (name) hit

Zhang San hasn't been hit by Li Si.

There is no negation of the *bei* passive retaining the final *le* as there is for active constructions with sentential and inchoative *le*: For example (89) cannot be considered to contain the sentence final inchoative *le* construction as it has no corresponding negated form with *mei(you)...le* (as (91) shows) that could give the meaning "Zhang San hasn't been hit by Li Si anymore for a while now":

91. *Zhang San mei you bei Li Si da le.
(name) NEG₂ BEI (name) hit INC

This also serves as more evidence for our contention that the passive does not express the arising of a new state of affairs for the subject. If it did, it should then be able to co-occur with sentential *le*, the syntactic exponent which as I have explained indicates the inception of a new state. Examples (90) and (91) show conclusively that *bei* patterns like the active constructions with verbal suffix *-le* (or completive *-le*) with respect to the choice of negative constructions.

Secondly, we find examples of the *bei* passive with verbal classifiers occupying the sentence final position which the grammatical particle *le* precedes. This shows that the *le* in question must be verbal *-le* again.
92. Zhang San bei Li Si da -le yidun.
(name) BEI (name) hit:COM one:CL

Zhang San was given a beating by Li Si.

Similarly, in the *bei* passive of bodily effect (q.v.
Chapter 3) where we find a second or 'retained object' following
upon the main verb in the predicate, the particle *le* once more does
not occupy sentence final position:

93. Mali bei caoyuan de baofengxue dong-huai - le
(name) BEI grassland GEN snowstorm freeze:damage:COM
*liang shou*.
two hand

Mary had both her hands frozen badly in the snowstorms of
the grasslands.

Based on this syntactic evidence, the grammatical
particle <u>le</u> found in the passive construction can be classified as
the completive aspect marker (COM) and not the inchoative sentential
<u>le</u> (INC). As we examine the other syntactic strategies used to
encode completion of the passive event, more semantic evidence for
this feature will be revealed.

********

1.3.2 The Durative Aspect Marker -zhe:

In the previous section, it was shown that predicates
without the aspectual marking of -le such as that in (66) cannot co-
occur with the passive as they do not conform to the semantic
requirement of expressing completion of an event. Precisely for
this reason, predicates in the durative aspect are not compatible
with *bei*. The durative aspect marker -zhe may be treated in a
similar way to the completive aspect marker -le as a verbal affix:
94. *Zheipi xiao ma bei ta cihou -zhe.
this:CL little horse BEI he serve :DUR

Only when the particle *bei* is omitted to form a topic-comment
construction do we obtain an acceptable sentence:

95. Zheipi xiao ma ta cihou -zhe.
this:CL little horse he serve :DUR
This little horse is being looked after by him.

The meaning encoded by the durative aspect cannot be
reconciled with that of the completion of the passive event encoded
by *bei*. There are two main constructions using the durative aspect
with verbs of intentional action. The first construction denotes
that an activity is in progress for a certain period of time,
concurrent with a second event, action or state of affairs, the
latter being indicated by the main clause of a complex sentence:

96. Yige ren zuo-zai taiyang dili, guai lingqiao de one:CL person sit:at sun place:in, very nimble ADV feng -zhe.
sew : DUR
One person was sitting in a sunny spot, very nimbly sewing.

97. Zhanshimen zou zai shanjiao xia, zhidian -zhe shantou.
soldiers walk at mount. foot below, point:DUR peak
The soldiers walked along the foot of the mountain,
pointing at the mountain top...

Only action verbs whose meaning is suited to this
interpretation of ongoing activity are compatible with -zhe. Verbs
such as dadao 'overthrow' and jueding 'decide' which include the
endpoint of the action in the meaning are thus excluded.²⁹

29. See Ren Xueliang, *A Comparative Grammar of Chinese-English*, (1981), p.164 for a comprehensive list of verbs which do not take the durative aspect marker.
In order to precisely explicate why the semantic structure
of the *bei* passive is incompatible with durative constructions, this
first construction with *-zhe* can provisionally be given the
representation:

Person A (the subject and agent) is doing something
that s/he wants to do for a certain period of time

The second construction with the durative aspect marker
*-zhe* expresses that the state of affairs involving the subject and
caused by his or her prior action, is being sustained for a certain
period of time. This construction is 'self-sufficient' in that it
does not need to be part of a larger complex sentence as does the
first one.<fnref n="30" />

98. Ta zhi you shi-ba sui, shu -zhe shuang bian,
    she only have eighteen years, comb:DUR pair plaits,
    <u>chuan -zhe baise changpao...</u>
    wear :DUR white long:gown

She was only eighteen, putting her hair into two plaits
and wearing a long white chongsam.

For the second durative construction, I tentatively
propose a semantic representation of this form:

Person A (the subject) comes to be in a state
s/he wants to be in for a certain period of time
because of something s/he (A) did

<footnote n="30">30. Jing Shijun, *Xiandai Hanyu Xiuci*, (1980), p.300 provided the only analysis of *-zhe* where 'two meanings' for *-zhe* used with action verbs are pointed out, although he does not recognize two different syntactic constructions. (The case of *-zhe* used with adjectives is not relevant to the present discussion and thus not treated.) Li and Thompson (1981:221) recognize the use of *-zhe* in simple and complex constructions but their analysis is different to mine.</footnote>
Neither of these durative constructions is semantically
suited for use in the *bei* passive since in the passive, the subject
is not the agent and thus cannot be understood to carry out any
intentional action and secondly the action depicted by the passive
is not one which is ongoing, that is, it cannot be a non-completive
action. The components representing these features in the passive
are:

Something happened to person A (the subject and
undergoer)

because someone else (an agent) did something

As both durative constructions are concerned with
predicating something of an agent who is the sentential topic:
specifically either an ongoing activity or a sustained state of
affairs, the inception of which is caused by the agent, neither are
able to refer to the agent of a passive event, who is not the topic
or subject and has only a secondary role in the illocutionary force
of the passive expression (0.1). Therefore, the use of -zhe to
indicate non-completion of an action or a sustained state of affairs
causes it to be incompatible with the *bei* passive.

********

### 1.3.3 The Experiential Aspect Marker -guo:

A third aspect marker in Chinese, the experiential aspect
marker -guo, unlike the durative aspect marker -zhe, may be used in
the *bei* passive in place of the completive aspect marker -le with
the meaning of the subject having experienced the passive event at
least once in the past. Guo also acts as a verbal affix:
99. Mali bei ta pian -guo.

(name) BEI he deceive:EXP

Mary had the experience of being tricked by him.

Not only is this aspect marker concerned with predicating something about the subject in terms of experiencing an event and thus suiting it to a construction where the topic is the undergoer, but since it pertains to *past* experience, it also encodes definitively that the event has taken place (cf. Ren Xueliang 1981:173).

### 1.3.4 Negation

The strongest piece of evidence to support the claim that the *bei* passive only expresses completed events is the fact that negation of the main verb in the predicate is not permitted.³¹ This means that the verb of the *bei* predicate is always in affirmative form. If the passive construction is to be negated then the negative marker must precede both *bei* and the predicate:

SUBJECT NEGATIVE MARKER BEI AGENT VERB PHRASE

and not the verb phrase as in active constructions, a point exemplified by (100):

*SUBJECT BEI AGENT NEGATIVE MARKER VERB PHRASE

100. *Li Si bei Mali bu / mei (you) kun-qilai.*
(name) BEI (name) NEG₁ / NEG₂ tie:up

The semantic effect of negation within the predicate would be to deny that the agent carried out any action against the
subject of the passive sentence. Yet, at the same time, due to the
use of the passive form, interpretation is being sought for what the
agent did in fact do to cause an adverse state of affairs to arise
for the subject-undergoer. It is comparable to trying to interpret
the English sentence: "John underwent Bill not hitting him".

The two main negative constructions with *bu* + *VP* and *mei(you)* + *VP* were semantically described above in (i). Due to their semantic characteristics, only *mei(you)* is suited to be the form of negation for the passive.

When *mei(you)* is used to negate the passive, it has the
identical semantic effect as in active constructions. - It
contradicts the assumption that the (passive) event ever took
place. Consider (101):

101. Li Si mei(you) bei Mali kun-qilai.
(name) NEG₂ BEI (name) tie:up

Li Si hasn't been tied up by Mary (such an event never
happened).

Secondly, as described above, the use of the negative
marker *bu* contradicts the assertion of a certain person wanting to
cause an event or having caused the event but not the assertion of
the event itself. The appropriate inference with *bu* is that the
event took place but another person was the agent responsible for
causing it. For this semantic reason, the negative *bu* may not be
used with the passive construction since the subject which it
syntactically follows and refers to is not an
agent but an undergoer:

102. \*Li Si bu bei Mali kun-qilai.
(name) NEG₁ BEI (name) tie:up
Thus, only the construction with *mei(you)* is properly
used to form the negative counterpart of the passive, in its
contradiction of the event rather than in its contradiction of an
agent's intention to do something (1.3.1). If, however, the passive
is embedded in a nominalizing *shi....de* construction<fnref n="32" /> which can
be used to put an agent into focus as in (103):

103. Shi ta zuo de.
SHI he do DE

He's the one who did it.

to produce the passive

104. Li Si shi bei Mali kun-qilai de.
(name) SHI BEI (name) tie:up DE

Li Si was tied up by Mary.

then this may be negated by *bu*:

105. Li Si bu shi bei Mali kun-qilai de.
(name) NEG₁ SHI BEI (name) tie:up DE

Li Si was not tied up by Mary (someone else did it).

It is clear that this use of *bu* cannot genuinely be regarded as the
negation of the passive form but rather as the negation of the
*shi...de* form. Hence, the *bei* passive may only be negated by the
use of *mei(you)* unless it is embedded in other syntactic
constructions as in (104) above. *Mei(you)* is the negative marker
one would predict would apply to a passive which expresses
completiveness of an event and uses aspect markers such as verbal
*-le* to achieve this semantic end.

<footnote n="32">32. The *shi...de* construction is discussed in detail in Li and Thompson (1981:587-593).</footnote>
### 1.3.5 Modal Verbs

Similarly, the use of modal verbs in the predicate contradicts the semantic property of completiveness by expressing either the future possibility of an event or that the agent has the ability to carry out a certain action. Two modal verbs _neng_ 'can' and _hui_ 'be possible' (among their other meanings) are treated here as being fairly representative.

The modal verb _neng_ never co-occurs with the completive aspect marker _-le_; that is, with verbal _-le_:

106. Xiao Mei _neng shuo_ Riyu.
(name) can speak Japanese

Xiao Mei can speak Japanese.

107. \*Xiao Mei _neng shuo -le_ Riyu.
(name) can speak:COM Japanese

whereas it does occur with the sentential and inchoative _le_:

108. Xiao Mei _neng shuo Riyu_ _le_.
(name) can speak Japanese INC

Now Xiao Mei can speak Japanese.

Since this modal verb refers to the ability of the subject to do something just as _bu_ refers to the subject's intention of not wanting to do something, that is, both require an agentive subject, _neng_ cannot be used in the passive where the subject is the undergoer:

109. \*Mali _neng bei_ jingcha zhua-dao - (le).
(name) can BEI police arrest : (COM)
The fact that *neng* cannot co-occur with the completive aspect marker -le in active form sentences as in (107) above would also lead us to suspect that *neng* would be semantically incompatible with the passive.

The situation is the same for the negated form of the modal verb: *bu neng* 'cannot' as it may not co-occur with the passive either, shown by (110), unless the passive construction has been 'nominalized' through the use of the *shi...de* construction, exemplified by (111): However, here the meaning of *bu neng* is understood as 'not be possible' rather than 'cannot', whereas the affirmative form *neng* in the passive is restricted to the latter 'ability' sense:

110. *Mali bu neng bei jingcha zhua-dao -(le).*
(name) NEG₁ can BEI police arrest :(COM)

111. *Mali bu neng shi bei jingcha zhua-dao de.*
(name) NEG can SHI BEI police arrest DE

It's not possible that Mary's been arrested *by the police*.

In contrast to *neng*, the verb *hui* refers to ability in the sense of knowing how to do something and may be used as a main verb with this meaning:

112. *Mali hui Yingwen.*
(name) can English

Mary knows how to speak English.

*Hui*, when used as a modal verb, strongly affirms the likelihood of occurrence of an event as opposed to the meaning of 'possibility'
rendered by *neng*, in one of its senses:³³

113. Ta hui daying
she will agree
She will agree.

Thus *hui* may be used in both the affirmative and negated passives, provided it precedes the morpheme *bei* and never occurs in the predicate.³⁴ Like *bu neng*, it qualifies the nature of the event, not the subject.

114(a) Mali (bu) hui bei jingcha zhua-dao - le.
(name) (NEG) can BEI police arrest : COM

It's (not) likely that Mary has been arrested by the police.

(b) *Mali bei jingcha (bu) hui zhua-dao - (le).*
(name) BEI police (NEG) can arrest :(COM)

This section has argued in favour of considering the completive nature of the passive event to be a semantic invariant of the passive construction. The main strategy used to encode this feature was demonstrated to be the completive aspect marker **-le** and less commonly the experiential aspect marker **-guo**. At the same time, the two main functions of **le** were distinguished: its verbal use encoding completiveness and its sentential use encoding the

33. *Neng* and *hui* cannot be negated by *mei* (you) when used in the senses outlined above that are appropriate for the passive (v. Lü 1981:244-245 and 367-369).

34. The notion of 'possibility' is bettered rendered by *keneng*:

Mali keneng bei jingcha zhua-dao-le
(name) possible BEI police arrest : COM
It's possible that Mary has been arrested by the police.
inception of a new state of affairs. Here is what was shown that only
the completive aspect marker was used with the passive and not the
latter.

Further evidence supporting the claim that the semantic
property of completiveness is grammaticalised by the passive
construction was shown in the fact that syntactic constituents such
as negative markers, modal verbs and the progressive aspect marker
which all have the general semantic effect of encoding
'non-completion', were unable to occur in the passive predicate.
## 1.4 VERB RESTRICTIONS OR THE DISPOSAL NATURE OF BEI: A COUNTERARGUMENT

Linguists writing on the topic of passives in Chinese generally point out that only transitive verbs are suitable for use in such constructions, and then only those of a 'disposal nature'. This description is derived from Wang Li's *Theory of Chinese Grammar* in which the *ba* construction is characterized as the "Disposal Form" because it is used to "dispose of the object through the action of the verb" expressing "how people are organized, controlled and treated or how things are dealt with and put into effect" (1947:163,161).

Wang Huan (1957:41) takes up this theme, pointing out that transitive verbs which do not have the meaning of disposal mainly cannot occur in the *bei* passive either: "There seem to be no verbs which can be used in *ba* sentences and not be used in *bei* sentences".

Li and Thompson (1981:501) also characterise the *bei* passive in terms of disposal:

> [T]he *bei* sentence also describes an event in which an entity or person is dealt with, handled or manipulated in some way. This is why, just as with the *ba* construction, *bei* is not found with verbs that do not signal disposal, even if they have adverse meaning.

However, Wang Huan goes on to make the remark that there are in fact "some verbs which can be used in *bei* sentences but not in *ba* sentences such as *zhidao* 'know', *kanjian* 'see', *tingjian* 'hear', *pengdao* 'bump into', *xinren* 'believe' and *yonghu* 'protect' (1958:41)". Hong Xinheng (1956:27) also points out that verbs describing mental activities are proscribed from the passive, which
he exemplifies with xihuan 'like' (my numbering):

115. *Ta bei wo hen xihuan-le.
he BEI I very like : COM

In section 1.1 of Part I, I have already argued the case against verb classification being used as a method of analysis. Wang Huan's list of verbs is not exhaustive, nor could it be, while her observation that the kind of verbs occurring in the *bei* passive mainly overlaps with that occurring in the *ba* construction with the addition of the ones listed above, is indicative I believe, of the difference in meaning between these two constructions and that moreover they should be treated separately in analysis rather than showing any great commonality of meaning.

Hong Xinheng's description of the verbs co-occurring in the *bei* passive is, on the other hand, too imprecise as even Wang Huan's list contains a counterexample in the form of the verb *zhidao* 'know' which fits the description of a verb of 'mental activity' yet is acceptable in the *bei* passive [q.v. example (26) above]. Furthermore, the reason for the incompatibility of the verb *xihuan* 'like' with the passive in (115) is not explained by its being a verb of "mental activity" either as we will see below nor by its not being lexically adversative for as we have seen above in section 1.1, even the verb *ai* 'love' may co-occur with the passive [q.v. example (22)] despite its non-adversative nature as a single lexical item, since it does not counteract the overall interpretation of adversity: "Xiao Mei 'suffered' Zhang san loving her to the point of desperation."
In this section it will be argued that not only do many
verbs of accidental happening, cognition and perception co-occur
with the passive but also experiencer verbs such as 'torment',
'hate' and 'love', facts which require a refinement in analysis away
from describing the *bei* passive in terms of requiring transitive
verbs or disposal verbs to co-occur with it.

These verbs of accidental happening or emotional
experience typically do not have agents as subjects in their active
usage, although they display transitive syntax in being able to
co-occur with 'direct objects'. When they are used in the *bei*
passive, in a similar way to predicates which express neutral or
fortunate events in active form, they undergo a semantic
transformation. This is not just one that results in expressing
'adversity' however but also one where only an agentive reading for
the verb becomes possible. They come to be interpreted as meaning
that their subjects carried out an action intentionally. Experiencer
verbs such as *xihuan* 'like', however, which do not have this second
possible agentive reading will be shown to be excluded.

A corollary to the presentation of this evidence is to
show that it is only when the semantic conditions of the grammatical
construction as a whole are met that acceptable *bei* passives are
formed, so that consideration of the verb alone cannot predict nor
enable us to devise the 'rules' of acceptability.

It is true that nontransitive verbs cannot form part of
the predicate of the passive: Stative verbs such as adjectives are
proscribed for a start:

<footnote n="116">116. *Yanjing bei jidong de leishui mohu -le.
eye BEI excited REL tears blurred:COM</footnote>
Sentence (116) only becomes acceptable once the stative verb *mohu* is
combined with an explicit action verb to form the resultative
compound *nong-mohu* 'make blurred':

117. Yanjing bei jidong de leishui nong-mohu -le.
eye BEI excited REL tears make:blurred:COM
(Her) eyes became blurred through tears of excitement
(to her disadvantage).

Similarly, verbs which are semantically and syntactically
intransitive in that they refer only to effect on the subject of an
event that does not extend beyond this subject to a second entity
are also proscribed:

118. *Wo bei zhei qingjing leng-zhu -le.*
I BEI this sight stunned : COM

The event in (118) may only be paraphrased in the form of an
'active' subject-verb construction:

119. *Wo leng-zhu-le.*
I stunned :COM
I was stunned.<fnref n="35" />

Even though in English it is possible, indeed quite ordinary to use
experiencer verbs (also known as the Psych Movement verbs) such as
'stun' transitively, as in "The news stunned me", pure experiencer
verbs cannot occur in S-V-O constructions [nor the passive, q.v.
(118)] in Chinese: The person who is the experiencer must be the
syntactic subject as in (119) as opposed to the unacceptable (120)

<footnote n="35">35. Examples from Guo Derun (1981:35-36). He is another linguist who claims more broadly that only transitive verbs can occur in the passive.</footnote>
where the cause is the subject:

120. *Qingjing leng-zhu -le wo.
sight stun : COM I

Wang Huan gives a list of verbs which cannot occur in either the *bei* or *ba* construction. Although most of these verbs have transitive syntax in that they may take a surface object NP in active form sentences, on closer examination they prove to be mainly verbs which indicate a state of affairs for the subject (1957:41), a generalization which Wang Huan misses out on making:

you 'have' zai 'be at' dang (jiaoyuan) 'act (as a teacher)'
de (bing) 'get sick' qi (zuoyong) likai 'leave' 'have the use'
xiang 'resemble' shuyu 'belong' jiejin 'be close to'
yikao 'rely on'

All these verbs are used in expressions which are concerned with saying something about the subject and where a second entity - the undergoer of an action - is not present. (They may co-occur with other NPs of course, but these are semantically not definable as undergoers.) Chao (1968:703,705-6) similarly attempts to classify verbs into disposal and non-disposal ones.

Wang Huan does not claim that her list is comprehensive and this certainly is not the case: It is easy to think of other verbs which do not occur in the passive (or likewise in the *ba* construction) and are not otherwise classifiable as stative or intransitive: For example, *yunxu* 'allow' exhibits transitive syntax but does not co-occur with *bei*: *Ta yunxu wo zuo* ("He lets me do it") but *Wo bei ta yunxu zuo le*. Yet *yunxu* 'allow' meets Wang Li's description of what a 'Disposal Verb' is (see quote above).
Another drawback of a characterisation of verbs occurring
in the passive as either transitive or more specifically as
'disposal' is that it cannot account for the following facts:

121. Ta bei Mali fan-si - le.
he BEI Mary annoy:INT:COM
He was annoyed so intensely by Mary.

122. Ta bei Mali hen-si - le.
he BEI Mary hate:INT:COM
He was hated so intensely by Mary.

123. *Ta bei Mali taoyan-si - le.
he BEI Mary dislike:INT:COM

All three verbs may be used in S-V-O syntactic
constructions which are thus formally transitive: *Mali hen/fan/
taoyan ta*. ("Mary hates/annoys/dislikes him") and thus meet this
criterion, assuming a syntactic definition of transitivity was
intended by the writers mentioned above, yet for some reason *taoyan*
'dislike' or 'detest' may not be used in the passive. Secondly,
neither can the disposal classification clarify why two of the three
verbs form acceptable passives as in fact none express how 'an
object is disposed of', unless the idea of disposal is interpreted
so broadly as to make it useless as a definition.

Li and Thompson (1981:468) save the concept of 'disposal'
by qualifying their definition with the statement that

The idea of disposal can also be inferred or
understood in an implicit way. For example,
while sentence (21) with *ai* 'love' as a verb,
is not acceptable because 'love' does not carry
the sense of disposal,

[(21) *ta ba xiao mao ai* (S/He loves the
kitten)]
sentence (27), which also uses the verb *ai*
'love', is perfectly acceptable:

(27) ta ba xiao mao ai de yao si
3sg BA small cat love CSC want die
S/He loves the kitten so much that she
wants to die.

... The added expression *yao si* 'want to die', however, hyperbolically creates an image that such intense love must have some effect on the 'small cat'. Thus, the disposal idea in (27) is not explicitly stated by the verb. The fact that the 'small cat' is dealt with in some sense is merely implied by the verb together with the added expression.

Thus, although Li and Thompson adopt the verb
classification approach as the test of acceptability for both *ba* and
*bei* constructions, they do make the proviso that the implication of
disposal may be conveyed by other syntactic elements in combination
with the verb in some cases. On this point my analysis concurs with
their's.

In the *ba* construction, the overall interpretation must
be one where the undergoer is clearly "affected by the action".
Moreover, in some constructions belonging to the general *ba*
construction, the entity denoted by the NP following *ba* is more
specifically understood to undergo a change of a state.<fnref n="36" /> In the
*bei* passive, while no change of state<fnref n="37" /> is involved for the under-
goer as an invariant feature of its interpretation (as opposed to
implication in some examples), the undergoer must be understood as
being affected adversely by the *action* of an agent (apart from one

<footnote n="36">36. The different *ba* constructions are examined in detail in my Honours thesis "Semantics of Some Causatives in Chinese and English", (unpublished), ANU, 1978.</footnote>

<footnote n="37">37. Chu (1974:441-2) argues to the contrary, that there is a change of state feature encoded by the passive.</footnote>
particular construction involving a natural force). This is the criterion we can use to predict which predicates involving experiencer verbs or verbs of perception, cognition and accidental happening may be used in the passive.

The subtly differing behaviour of verbs of emotion, cognition and perception shows that if they form predicates which have only a stative reading, so that no interpretation as an action is possible, then they are excluded from the passive. These are verbs such as *xihuan* 'like', *taoyan* 'dislike' and *mingbai* 'understand' which form predicates that are purely stative semantically as opposed to predicates formed by verbs such as *ai* 'love', *hen* 'hate' and *zhidao* 'know' which all take on an action interpretation in the passive. With predicates formed by verbs such as *xihuan* 'like', it is difficult to interpret the effect on the person who is "being liked" as this is a state of affairs which is semantically intransitive, not extending in its effect much beyond the experiencer of this feeling. On the other hand predicates formed by *hen* 'hate' or *ai* 'love' can be understood to have a direct effect upon a second person in the form of appropriate action as an expression of these feelings, either by words or deeds. The passive is very sensitive to this distinction as it is only predicates with this active interpretation which may be found in it:

124. *Mali bei Zhang San xihuan (taoyan) de budeliao.
(name) BEI (name) like (dislike) EXT extremely

125. Mali bei Zhang San ai-shang - le zhi hou,
(name) BEI (name) fall:in:love:COM after,
jiao de ta bu de anning.
disturb EXT she not get peace

After Mary had Zhang San fall in love with her, she was disturbed so much by it that she could get no peace.
126. Mali bei Zhang San hen de bu zhidao zenmo ban.
(name) BEI (name) hate EXT not know what to do

) Mary was hated so much by Zhang San she was at a loss to know what to do.

In order to meet the semantic requirements of the passive, experiencer verbs typically form complex predicates so that the interpretation of adversity and causal action can be made. Thus, the verbs *ai* 'love' and *hen* 'hate' modified by only the completive aspect marker -le fail to fulfil such conditions:

127. *bei ta ai (hen) -le*
BEI he love (hate):COM

Only the complex predicates of (125), (126) and (122) with *ai-shang* 'fall in love', *hen de bu zhidao zenmo ban* 'hated so that one is at a loss to know what to do'; *hen-si* 'hated intensely' or others such as *ai de budeliao* 'loved to the point of desperation' produce semantically well-formed passives.

As for the verbs *xihuan* 'like' and *taoyan* 'dislike', even when they form complex predicates as in (124) or (123), they are nonetheless excluded due to their purely stative meaning.

The case is identical for verbs of cognition or mental activity exemplified here by *zhidao* 'know' as opposed to *mingbai* 'understand' and *xinren* 'trust'. In the passive, *zhidao* 'know' forms a predicate with the interpretation 'find out something about someone':

128. Neijian shi bei ta zhidao - le.
that:CL matter BEI he know : COM

That matter has been found out about by him (to our detriment).
The passive in (128) implies that the information which the agent *ta* 'he' may only have accidentally come across is going to be used against us by him, now that he knows about it, accounting for the "active" interpretation of *zhidao*. In this way the direct and adversative effect can be interpreted. Predicates formed with *mingbai* 'understand' and *xinren* 'trust' express states of affairs which do not extend beyond the would-be passive agent to affect a second entity - an undergoer, and are thus excluded:

129. *Neijian shi bei ta mingbai - le.*
that:CL matter BEI he understand:COM

130. *Neige ren bei ta xinren - le.*
that:CL person BEI he trust : COM

Verbs of perception such as *tingjian* 'hear' and *kanjian* 'see' undergo a similar semantic transformation to that of *zhidao* 'know' when they are used in the passive: In non-passive expressions, these verbs are non-control verbs, that is, verbs which designate events or happenings rather than the intentional action of an agent:

131. *Zanmen de hua bei shifu tingjian -le.*
our GEN talk BEI concierge hear : COM
Our conversation was overheard by the concierge.

132. *Wo de xianglian bei renjia kanjian -le.*
my GEN necklace BEI people see : COM
My necklace was noticed by people.

In both (131) and (132), even though the concierge hearing us talk or other people catching sight of my (expensive) necklace may be accidental events, the use of the passive implies in (131) that the
concierge upon once hearing us talk continued to listen in to our conversation and in (132) whenever other people caught sight of my necklace (which I had meant to keep hidden under my blouse), they continued to stare at it, to my discomfort.

Finally, the use of action verbs *dou* 'tease' and *qifu* 'bully' are contrasted with the experiencer verbs *fan* 'annoy' and *zhemo* 'torment':

The intentional action verbs *dou* 'tease' and *qifu* 'bully' occur in the passive with the minimal predicate modification of the completive aspect marker -le.

133. Ta bei tongxuemen dou - le yi-xia.
he BEI classmates tease :COM one:CL
He was given a teasing by his classmates.

134. Ta bei tongxuemen qifu - le.
he BEI classmates bully : COM
He was bullied by his classmates.

Action verbs cannot however take the intensifier modification of *si* 'to death' to form resultative compound verbs as can the stative verbs. *Dou-si* and *qifu-si* would mean literally, if acceptable, 'tease to death' and 'bully to death' respectively, rather than 'tease very much' and 'bully very much'. This is precisely the modification which the two experiencer verbs *fan* 'annoy' and *zhemo* 'torment' need in order to be used in the passive as when they form predicates with only an aspect marker they are unacceptable:

135. *Mali bei ta fan (zhemo) - le.
(name) BEI he annoy (torment):COM
In (135) there is no clear interpretation of the agent carrying out
an action, nor consequently of the adverse state of affairs arising
for the subject. For example, the event denoted by fan 'annoy' is
likely to be interpreted as exclusively affecting ta 'he' and not
the subject 'Mary', since one ordinary non-passive use of fan is
(136):

136. Ni fan shenmo?

you annoy what

What are you getting so annoyed about?

Thus, one possible syntactic means to make a more complex predicate
and thus fulfil all the semantic conditions is to use the intensifier
si:

137. Mali bei ta fan- (zhemo)-si - le.

(name) BEI he annoy (torment):INT:COM

Mary was annoyed (tormented) exceedingly by him.

We saw above that this intensifier could also be used with hen
'hate' in (122) to form a complex predicate. In the case of purely
stative verbs such as xihuan 'like' and taoyan 'dislike', even when
the more complex predicates with the intensifier si were formed as
in (123), an active interpretation was still not possible, with the
result that they can never occur in the passive.

In this section it has been shown that the acceptability
of bei sentences cannot be predicted in terms of defining the verbs
which occur in the passive as 'transitive' or 'disposal'. The fact
that there are verbs which are syntactically transitive such as
xinren 'trust' and mingbai 'understand' and yet are unable to occur
in the passive combined with the fact that there are verbs which do
not have the 'disposal' meaning such as those of cognition,
perception and emotion yet may occur in the passive provides us with
sufficient counterevidence to reject both these methods of analysis.

The tautologous nature of Wang Li's original definition
of 'disposal' (1947:161) is a further reason for rejecting the
latter as it cannot be applied rigorously in the analysis of the
passive nor of the *ba* construction:

> Since the Disposal Form is specifically designed for disposing, if the action is not of the disposal nature, then the Disposal Form cannot be used.

The task of classifying verbs into disposal and non-
disposal types is one that I believe can never be completed. Not
only is the definition of a disposal verb too vague, but also the
two lists would be open-ended. As such they may only be regarded
as representative of the kinds of verbs found occurring in the
passive and those which are not. Far better to try to pinpoint the
overall semantic conditions operating with respect to the *bei*
passive so that co-occurrence of verbs among other syntactic and
semantic features can be predicted by the one generalization rather
than to resort to lists of verbs. The formalisation of the semantic
analysis of the *bei* passive carried out chiefly in Chapter 1 is
presented in Chapter 2 below.
## 2. THE _BEI_ PASSIVE CONSTRUCTIONS

### 2.1 THE AGENT AND THE EUROPEANIZED PASSIVE:

Since the _bei_ passive is not the most common syntactic
strategy used in Chinese to express a passive event (0.1), several
analyses have put forward the view that one of the main functions of
either the morpheme _bei_ or the _bei_ construction is to introduce the
agent as in (138) (e.g. Guo Derun 1981:29; Zhang Zhigong 1957:91):

138. Yishang bei ta si-po le.
clothes BEI she tear:break COM
The clothes were torn to shreds by her.

If there is no agent, then the _bei_ passive is not the
syntactic form to choose for expressing the said passive event.
Here the topic-comment construction will be used instead of (138)
and _not an agentless bei_ passive:<fnref n="38" />

139. Yishang ye si-po - le...
clothes too tear:break:COM
The clothes were also torn to shreds...

140. \*Yishang bei si-po - le.
clothes BEI tear:break:COM

<footnote n="38">38. Those who share this point of view are Wang Li (1947), p.178; Loh Dian-yang (1959), I, p.132; Hong Xinheng (1956), p.23; Guo Derun (1981), p.37 and Wang Huan (1957), p.47. Under this category, we can subsume cases where there is no need to express an agent or where the agent is not known.</footnote>
If one of the functions of the *bei* passive is to make the agent explicit it the case then that the agent is an obligatory syntactic feature? Wang Li claims this is so (1947:182):

> The regular passive form in Chinese must express the agent ... sentences like *Ta bei sha* [He was killed] are rarely seen. Thus, when we want to translate the Occidental passive that has no "converted subject" [i.e. the "agentless passive"] into Chinese, it is often very difficult if not impossible. For example ... No reason has been assigned; No objection had been made to her conduct.

Later, in Hanyu Yufa Gangyao, (under the nom de plume of Wang Liaoyi) he elaborates on this point (1957:112):

> If there is *bei*, then ordinarily there always needs to be an agentive phrase ... At least, the word *ren* [somebody] should be added, as in Women *bei* ren qifu [We've been treated in a cavalier manner by people].

Chu (1974:455) flatly contradicts this viewpoint with his statement "All passive sentences have underlying Agentive NP that may be deleted".

It is certainly the case in English that the agentive *by* phrase is not an obligatory syntactic constituent of either the *be* or the *get* passive. I propose however that in Chinese, the general *bei* passive can be divided into two broad categories, the agentive *bei* passive and the Europeanized *bei* passive. Hence, I am claiming that the agent is an invariant syntactic feature of the traditional *bei* passive while it is only in the Europeanized passive that it seems to be "optional". The Europeanized *bei* passive itself may be divided into agentive and agentless kinds.

The traditional *bei* passive did of course evolve historically from an agentless structure as was described in 0.2, the morpheme *bei* originally being a full verb with the meaning 'suffer from'.
What is meant by 'traditional' here is not the *bei* passive of the early Archaic period of Classical Chinese however, but rather the form which had developed by modern times (from the Tang dynasty 618-907 AD onwards) and is still in use today. 39

The Europeanized *bei* passive is a modified version of the traditional passive. It came into use in Chinese early this century, making its first appearance around the time of the May 4th Movement which began in 1919. 40 During this period, the popular movement amongst Chinese intelligentsia espousing the aims of reforming and modernizing China was preceded and accompanied by the ready availability of translations of western literature and philosophy as well as scientific and political works for the first time.

In these translated works, the *bei* passive was used to translate the passive constructions of European languages leading to two modifications in the semantic structure of the traditional passive construction:

(i) The Europeanized passive broadened in its application to include the expression of passive events both neutral and fortunate in nature and as a result lost its adversity constraint entirely.

(ii) Through the translation of agentless passives, the Europeanized passive lost the second constraint of the obligatory expression of the agent.

<footnote n="39">39. The period of Modern Chinese is as defined by Wang Li (1957:12) and Wang Liaoyi (1957:432).</footnote>

<footnote n="40">40. The May 4th Movement began with the incident on that date in 1919 when a demonstration was held in Beijing by students protesting against the 21 Demands of the Japanese Government, one being for China to cede German concessions in Shantung province to Japan. See also D.J. Waller, *The Government and Politics of Communist China* (1970), p.17. and Liu Wu Chi *An Introduction to Chinese Literature* (1966), p.262.</footnote>
As a result, the semantic structure of the Europeanized passive bears little resemblance to that of the traditional adversative passive. A further consequence of (ii) was that the morpheme *bei*, used syntactically to introduce the agent in the traditional passive (as does *by* in English) became equated with the auxiliary verb *be* and the past tense inflection on the participle of the English *be* passive in translations from the English.

The Europeanized passive can not only be distinguished from the traditional passive in terms of semantic structure but also in terms of usage: The former is restricted exclusively to the written language, unlike the latter which is used by certain sectors of the population as a spoken form (1.1) as well as in formal registers of speech. Moreover, the use of the Europeanized passive in the written language is largely confined to journalese, political works and propaganda and to a lesser extent to some works of communist literature in China.

The impact of European languages on the *bei* passive in Chinese is generally accepted as far as the broadening of meaning is concerned (1.1). Moreover, its overuse and expansion outside the domain of politically-oriented works, particularly, the agentless form of the Europeanized passive, is condemned in several major treatments of the use of *bei*, for example, in Loh Dian-yang (1959:1, 131):

> The use of *bei* before the verb to show the passive sense is evidently made popular by modern translators, who have recklessly introduced the English passive verbs into Chinese.

He continues this criticism by pointing out that passivized verbs such as
bei zunzhong 'be respected', bei huanying 'be welcomed', bei yi 'be translated' bei xie 'be written', etc. sound so awkward that they are still not accepted by Chinese writers.

Similarly, Lü and Zhu (1952:87) remark that examples of the agentless type such as

141. Xin bei xie-hao - le.

letter BEI write:finish:COM

(The letter has been written)

are "still not acceptable in the spoken language", supporting the claim that the Europeanized version of the passive is not used colloquially.<fnref n="41" />

Several previous treatments of *bei* single out two constructions, some classifying them as the 'complete' and the 'simplified' or 'simple' *bei* sentences, the 'simple' *bei* form being the agentless passive and the 'complete', the agentful passive.<fnref n="42" />

This classification corresponds only roughly to the strict division made here between the traditional adversative passive and the Europeanized passive according to their semantic structure. The Europeanized passive has this syntactic structure:

<table><thead><tr><th></th><th>NOUN PHRASE<br>(undergoer)</th><th>BEI</th><th>(NOUN PHRASE)<br>(agent)</th><th>VERB PHRASE</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>142.</td><td>Ta<br>she</td><td>bei<br>BEI</td><td>( )<br>( )</td><td>xuanwei zhuxi.<br>elect: as chairperson</td></tr></tbody></table>

She was elected as the chairperson.

<footnote n="41">41. Wang Liaoyi (1957:111) reiterates this point with the statement: "This kind of Europeanized grammar has not yet been adopted by the populace..." and with respect to examples such as (141) he says that "even those who like Europeanizing are not willing to add *bei* here (p.113)."</footnote>

<footnote n="42">42. Lü and Zhu (1952:87); Guo Derun (1981); Lü (1981:56-57) and Wang Huan (1957:42).</footnote>
Examples such as (142) have become formulaic in the political style of newspaper writing in China. To the contrary, in the spoken language, this meaning would be expressed by a non-passive construction:

143. Ta dangxuan zhuxi.
    she be elected chairperson
    She was elected chairperson.⁴³

Other examples of the agentless Europeanized passive are (144) and (145):

144. Zheige dui bei chengwei 'tie guniang' dui.
    this:CL team BEI call:as 'iron girl' team
    This team became known as the Iron Girl team.

145. 1949 nian Zhongguo Renmin bei jiefang -le.
    year China people BEI liberate:COM
    In 1949, the people of China were liberated.

Other events typically found encoded by the Europeanized passive in journalese are *bei biaoyang* 'be praised'; *bei zancheng* 'be approved'; *bei guli* 'be encouraged' and *bei jieshou* 'be accepted'. Although these events are all fortunate in nature, we will see below that misfortunate ones can also be encoded by the agentless Europeanized passive.

A further piece of evidence showing that agentless passives are not a feature of the spoken language in Chinese is provided by the two passives formed by *rang* and *jiao*. As these colloquial passives are exclusively agentful, no sentences analogous

43. Loh Dian-yang (1959: II, 70) drily notes that examples such as (143) are "pure Chinese" as opposed to (142) with the 'Europeanized' passive.
to the Europeanized *bei* passive of (142) exist:

146. *Ta rang (jiao) xuanwei zhuxi.*
she RANG (JIAO) elect:as chairperson

Moreover, for the Europeanized *bei* passive with an agent,
the case is identical: There are no colloquial analogues formed by
either *rang* or *jiao*, as both these passives are exclusively
adversative as well (Part II, Chapters 5 and 6 below for the
analysis of *rang* and *jiao* passives.).

147. *Ta rang (jiao) dajia xuanwei zhuxi.*
she RANG (JIAO) everybody elect:as chairperson

For the traditional *bei* passive, *jiao* and *rang* counterparts can, of
course be found:

148. Yifu dou bei (rang) (jiao) yu lin-tou -le.
clothes all BEI (RANG) (JIAO) rain soak:through:COM

The clothes have all been soaked thoroughly by the rain.

(The semantic differences between *bei*, *rang* and *jiao* are the topic of discussion in Part II, Chapter 6 below.)

Having given evidence of the usage of the Europeanized
passive being purely in the written sphere, we need to justify the
claim that the major means of distinguishing these two constructions
are their different semantic structures.

The Europeanized passive is easily separated out from the
traditional passive in that regardless of whether the passive event
expressed is neutral, fortunate or unfortunate for the undergoer on
the lexical level, 'adversity' is not part of the meaning
grammaticalized by this construction as a whole, contrary to the
case for the former (presented in 1.1). The verb of the passive
predicate may denote a kind of misfortune:

AGENTLESS 'EUROPEANIZED' PASSIVE

149. Jiefang hou, tufei bei suqing - le.
liberation after bandit BEI eliminate:COM
After liberation, bandits were eliminated.

Here, the implication of an adverse state of affairs for the
undergoer 'bandits' is attributable however purely to the lexical
content of the verb and not to the syntactic construction as a
whole. This is apparent from examples where the verb expresses a
fortunate event as in (150), which should be compared with (17), a
bei sentence of the traditional form:

'TRADITIONAL' BEI PASSIVE:

17. Wo zuotian bei laoshi hao-haor de biaoyang -le.
I yesterday BEI teacher well ADV praise : COM
Yesterday I was praised resoundingly by the teacher
(to my embarrassment).

AGENTLESS 'EUROPEANIZED' PASSIVE:

150. Zheiwei jinbu de nu yiren bei biaoyang -le.
this:CL advanced REL woman artiste BEI praise : COM
This progressive woman artiste was praised.

Recalling that (17) could only be understood ironically as "I was
criticised" or as an adverse state of affairs because the praise
caused 'me' great embarrassment, (150) is to the contrary completely
neutral in this respect as such a semantic transformation does not
occur with it, so that no 'adversity' is grammatically expressed.

Secondly, when the agent is explicitly mentioned in the
Europeanized passive, it never denotes a singular entity, that is,
an individual. Consider (151):
'EUROPEANIZED' PASSIVE WITH AN AGENT:

151.

*Neiwei nu yanyuan bei Hu Zhuxi zhu-he - le.

ta
jingli

that:CL woman actor BEI Chairman Hu congratulate:COM
him
manager

The agent of the Europeanized passive is typically a group of people often viewed as a politically defined unit and always viewed _en masse_ as an indistinguishable and non-identifiable group (the definition for which was given in (1.2):

dazhong 'the masses' renmen 'the public'
dajia 'everybody' renmin 'the people'

152.

Neng pubian de bei dazhong jieshou, xinshang,
can generally ADV BEI masses accept appreciate

---
ta hai bu jiu cheng - le dazhong wenyi ma?

it still not then become : COM masses literature Q

If it can be widely accepted and enjoyed by the masses,
then wouldn't it be the art and literature of the masses?

When an event is neutral with respect to the adversity
parameter, such as 'be assigned' and it is combined with an
individual agent (as opposed to a collective one), the construction
will be interpreted as the traditional adversative passive. Compare
(153) with (154) and (155):

AGENTLESS EUROPEANIZED PASSIVE

153.

Lao Sun Tongzhi bei fenpei dao Di Liu Qu lai.
old (name) comrade BEI assign to sixth district come

Old Comrade Sun was assigned to come to the Sixth
District.
EUROPEANIZED PASSIVE WITH A COLLECTIVE AGENT

154. Lao Sun Tongzhi bei shangji fenpei dao
old (name) conrade BEI higher levels assign to

Di Liu Qu lai.
sixth district come

Old Comrade Sun was assigned to come to the Sixth
District by the higher levels (of the Communist Party).

TRADITIONAL ADVERSATIVE PASSIVE

155. Di Laoshi bei xiaozhang fenpei dao ernianji qu-le.
(name) Teacher BEI principal assign to second:year go:COM

Teacher Di was assigned to second year by the principal
(to her misfortune, as she had been teaching a more
advanced class before).

The Europeanized passives in (153) and (154) are neutral with
respect to the resulting state of affairs for the subject, Comrade
Sun - neither passive form undergoing the semantic transformation to
the interpretation of an adverse state of affairs, whereas (155)
means that the teacher's allocation to second year was a demotion
for her.

The semantic space occupied by these two categories of
<u>bei</u> passives, Europeanized and traditional, is mutually exclusive in
the following way:

Any event, whether inherently desirable, undesirable or
neutral in this respect, may be encoded by the agentless
Europeanized passive, there being no grammaticalized component of
meaning concerning the effect of the event on the subject,
contextual inferences aside.

156. Ta bei yu wei mofang gongren.
she BEI eulogize:as model worker

She was eulogized as a model worker.
157. **Guai-guo yige wan, che bei du-zhu -le.**
   turn:EXP one:CL bend, cart BEI block : COM
   After turning the corner, the cart was blocked.

2.1.1 The Agentless Europeanized Bei Passive

The agentless Europeanized passive has the following semantic formula:

AGENTLESS EUROPEANIZED PASSIVE:

NOUN PHRASE BEI VERB PHRASE
(Undergoer)

Person A

Ta bei xuanwei zhuxi.

she BEI elect as chairperson

She was elected as chairperson.

Something happened to person A
because someone else did something to A
I don't need to say who.

2.1.2 The Europeanized Bei Passive with a Collective Agent

With the agentful passives, events which are inherently
neutral or desirable and involve a collective but non-identifiable
agent are encoded by the Europeanized form which structurally
requires an agent as one of its syntactic positions and, identically
to the agentless passive, is neutral with respect to the effect of
the event on the undergoer: Events of an adversative nature are
not, however, encoded by it, as we will see below:
EUROPEANIZED PASSIVE WITH A COLLECTIVE AGENT:

NOUN PHRASE BEI NOUN PHRASE VERB PHRASE
(Undergoer) (Agent)

Person A
Group B

Li Cheng bei shangji (*ta) tiba dao qu-
(name) BEI higher level (*he) promote to district:

shang gongzuo.

up work

Li Cheng was promoted up to the District level to work by the higher levels (of the Communist Party).

Something happened to person A
that these people B wanted
because B did something to A

Note that a further semantic distinction between the Europeanized passive with an explicit agent and the traditional passive is that in all cases the collective agent of the former wants to cause something to happen to the subject of the passive.⁴⁴ Given that this particular passive is heavily used to describe affairs in the political arena in formulaic terms, the presence of this semantic feature is not surprising.

44. Also note that the general Europeanized passive construction may be further subdivided into constructions with animate or inanimate subjects:

Qiang bei da-dao-le.
wall BEI topple:COM "The wall was pushed over."

Zheixie yijian mei you bei caina. "These viewpoints
this:CL opinion NEG₂ BEI adopt were not adopted."

Only the construction with animate subjects is treated here, as examples of the Europeanized passive with inanimate subjects are even less common colloquially than the 'traditional' bei passive with inanimate subjects, - the former being purely restricted to the written language.
To summarize, any passive event involving an 'identifiable' agent either individual or collective which has the overall interpretation of adversity for the undergoer, may only be expressed by means of the traditional adversative passive: In (158), the agent *Sirenbang* 'Gang of Four' is 'identifiable' in terms of the definition given in 1.2 and does not denote an indistinguishable group of people:

158. Ta bei Sirenbang wuxian wei zibenjia.
 she BEI Gang:of:Four frame as capitalist
 She was framed as a capitalist by the Gang of Four.

On the other hand, if speakers do not wish to express anything more than the basic passive event, that is, they do not view the state of affairs which arises for the undergoer as being adversative nor even view the event as either fortunate or neutral in this respect, then an alternative form is available - the topic-comment construction. The latter does not carry any implication of adversity or benefit whatsoever for the undergoer as part of its grammaticalized meaning.

Both these constructions - the traditional adversative passive and the topic-comment construction may be used in the written language as well where a third form - the Europeanized passive comprising two subconstructions, one agentful and one agent-less - is also available for use. - If writers neither want to express their viewpoint about the kind of new situation arising for the undergoer nor need to say who the agent is involved in the passive event, then the agentless Europeanized passive is the form to select. The use of this form is typical of translated works, scientific and political writing and journalese.
Finally, when the passive event involves a collective 'non-identifiable' agent and the overall interpretation remains neutral, then the agentful Europeanized passive is the correct form to use. Consequently, only the traditional *bei* passive constructions can be used to convey the speaker's viewpoint and this is confined to one of adversity, in addition to expressing an agentful passive event.

The four major traditional adversative passives have their semantic representations discussed in turn in the following pages, beginning with the *bei* passive with a person as the undergoer.
## 2.2 THE TRADITIONAL ADVERSATIVE BEI PASSIVES

In the preceding sections I have shown that the semantic restrictions on the traditional adversative passive in its general form are three-fold: First of all, the subject of the passive has to be identifiable. Secondly the event encoded by the passive must be understood to be completed and thirdly, the entire passive event is viewed as adversative by the speaker. In Chapters 5 and 6 of Part II, I will further claim and justify that the *bei* passive as opposed to the colloquial *jiao* and rang passives encodes the serious nature of the event.

Furthermore I claim that there are several discrete constructions all using the passive marker *bei*. In spite of their identical syntactic structure, the underlying semantic structures while all containing these three semantic features differ in their other components to the extent that none can be collapsed with any other. Natural units of language will be used as the semantic metalanguage to reduce these several distinct interpretations of the passive into less complex yet more easily comprehensible semantic definitions. Each of the four traditional passive constructions is given separate treatment in this order, with the last one, the passive of bodily effect being treated in a separate chapter, Chapter 3.

2.2.1 Adversative Bei Passive with a Person as the Undergoer.

2.2.2 Adversative Bei Passive of Possessions.

2.2.3 Adversative Bei Passive with a Natural Force.

3 Adversative Bei Passive of Bodily Effect.
2.2.1 The Adversative *Bei* Passive with a Person as the Undergoer:

This form of the *bei* passive with a person as the subject is considered by some to be the most prevalent one, for example, Guo Derun (1981:38). However he explains this phenomenon as a disambiguating strategy:

[P]eople and other animate beings can take action of their own accord. If *bei* isn't used for some sentences, the agent-undergoer relation will not be clear and may even cause ambiguity.

He claims that if the example (159) below hadn't been changed into a passive by adding *bei ta*, the subject 'my elder sister' would be understood as the agent and not as the undergoer, violating the context it belongs to:

159. Zui hou, qin jiejie bei ta lian hong dai pian,
finally, own elder: BEI he both cheat and hoodwink
sister

lian la dai zhuai, yan-baba de gei tuo-zou - le.
both pull and drag, helplessly ADV pass drag:away : COM

In the end, my elder sister was helplessly taken away by
him, both cheated and hoodwinked and dragged along
against her own will.

Guo's disambiguity hypothesis provides an interesting explanation for the prevalence of the *bei* passive with a personal NP as the subject. Another reason is that the adversity effect is more clearly interpretable where a person is the subject and undergoer than for inanimate subjects, since the latter cannot be thought of as being adversely affected by an event, only those to whom they belong (q.v. 2.2.2 below).
Apart from the *bei* passive with a natural force, the other three major constructions all have animate agents and thus require predicates of intentional action (1.4). Here is the semantic formula for the first construction:

ADVERSATIVE BEI PASSIVE WITH A PERSON AS THE UNDERGOER

<table><tr><td>NP<sub>p</sub></td><td>BEI</td><td>NP<sub>AN</sub></td><td>VP<sub>COM</sub></td></tr><tr><td colspan="2">Subject and Undergoer</td><td colspan="2">Agent</td></tr><tr><td>Person A</td><td></td><td>Person B</td><td></td></tr></table>

(i) Xiao Wang bei jingcha zhua-dao -le.
(name) BEI police arrest : COM
Xiao Wang was arrested by the police.

(ii) *Xiao Wang bei jingcha zhua-dao -zhe. (NON-COMPLETIVE)
(name) BEI police arrest : DUR

(iii) *Mali bei ren shuo - le.
(name) BEI people speak : COM (NO EFFECT ON SUBJECT)

(iv) Mali bei ren shuo de bu hao yise.
(name) BEI people speak EXT embarrassed
Mary was talked about so much by people that she got embarrassed.

(v) *Mali bei ta liaojie - le.
(name) BEI he understand:COM (NO EFFECT ON SUBJECT)

(vi) *Mali bei ta gei-le liangben shu.
(name) BEI he give:COM two:CL book (NO ADVERSATIVE EFFECT)

(vii) Mali bei ta na-zou - le liangben shu.
(name) BEI he take:away:COM two:CL book
Mary had two books taken away by him.
Thinking of this person (A)

I say:

Something happened to person A (event Y)
because person B did something to A
I'm thinking of Y as something serious and
something that was bad for A

### 2.2.2 The Adversative *Bei* Passive of Possessions:

The subject of this construction may be either animate or inanimate, provided it can be understood to be a person's "possession" in the sense that this person has control over or responsibility for the said object and regardless of whether this relationship between "owner" and "owned" is short-lived or enduring in nature. This relationship is simply captured by the formula "Thing X can be thought of as belonging to person A".

Thus, whenever the syntactic subject denotes a possession, the adverse state of affairs is viewed as affecting the person thought of as "owning" this thing. The "owner" may be explicitly encoded into the *bei* passive as in (160):

160. Wo de liangben shu bei ta na-zou - le.
my two:CL book BEI he take:away:COM

Two of my books were taken away by him.

or else it may be implicit, and we need the larger structure of
discourse to make this interpretation. Otherwise, the use of the
*bei* passive is not appropriate with a non-personal subject since a
state of affairs cannot be interpreted as adversative for an
inanimate entity nor for an animate non-human one unless the speaker
is thinking of it as a person (and then this would need a different
*bei* construction).

To clarify this point, consider the following example: It
is difficult to interpret (161) as an adverse state of affairs for
anyone: the case of a passer-by who comes across some pieces of broken tile on the road:

161: ??Jikuai wazi bei ren nong-sui - le.

several: CL tile BEI somebody make: smash:COM

??Some pieces of tile have been broken by somebody.

On the other hand, if the scene is the site of an archaeological dig where two workers have broken a porcelain bowl in attempting to excavate it, the use of this _bei_ passive by the chief archaeologist would be quite appropriate:

162. Neijian ciqi bei tamen lia nong-sui - le.

that: CL porcelain BEI they two make: smash:COM

The porcelain bowl was broken by those two.

Things which are public property, are value-less or no longer belong to anybody may be generally predicted therefore not to act as the subject of this _bei_ passive. Consider the following three examples:

??Yikuai feizhi
one: CL waste paper

163. ??Dishang de shuye } bei ta cai - le yijiao.
ground: on REL leaves BEI he tread:COM one foot

??The leaves on the ground were } trodden on by him.

??A piece of waste paper was

164. Huayuan bei ren cai -le.

garden BEI someone tread:COM

The garden was trampled over by someone.

165. ??Lajixiang bei ren nong-zang - le.

rubbish: bin BEI someone make dirty:COM

??The rubbish bin was made dirty by someone.
Out of the last three examples, only (164) can have a context easily found for it, for example, the gardener who looks after this particular garden, whereas for the other two examples it is difficult again to conceive of how these events could create an adverse state of affairs for anyone.

With regard to this semantic feature of the "adversely affected owner", I disagree with Wang Liaoyi's statement (1957:113) that "When the subject is an inanimate entity, regardless of whether the event is unfortunate or unexpected, *bei* must not be used ...". His four examples used to support this claim are unable to occur in the passive not because they have inanimate subjects but because the predicates contain intransitive verbs or verbs in potential form such as *da-bu-de* 'unable to beat' in example (B). Another example, (D), contains the verb *diu* 'lose', a verb of accidental happening which explains why it does not co-occur with the passive (see also 1.4) (my numbering):

166. *Ni er gege de yu bei diu -le.*
you second brother GEN jade BEI lose:COM
but more appropriately in a topic-comment construction

167. Ni er gege de yu diu -le.
you 2nd brother GEN jade lose:COM
Your second brother's jade was lost.

Secondly, there is no agent given in (166) either which means that such an example violates two semantic constraints of the *bei* passive: that the event be caused by an action, and that the agent of this action be explicitly mentioned.
Neither can events where there is no action involved form
the predicate of this passive construction. Compare (168) with
(169):

168. *Neijian shiqing bei ta hudu - le.
that:CL matter BEI he confuse:COM

169. Neijian shiqing bei ta gao-hudu-le.
that:CL matter BEI he make:confused:COM

That matter was muddled up by him (to our misfortune).

Similarly, if an adverse state of affairs is not encoded,
unacceptable sentences result:

170. *Neijian shiqing bei ta nong-le.
that:CL matter BEI he do : COM

171. Neijian shiqing bei ta nong de bu haoban -le.
that:CL matter BEI he do EXT not manageable:COM

That matter was made problematical to deal with by him.

The formula for this *bei* passive follows upon three more examples
and the syntactic schema:

ADVERSATIVE BEI PASSIVE OF POSSESSIONS

NP POSS = a noun phrase designating an entity or entities which
may be thought of as someone's belonging

(NP<sub>P</sub> + GEN) NP<sub>POSS</sub> BEI NP<sub>AN</sub> VP<sub>COM</sub>

(i) Wo de chezi bei ta de chezi zhuang-huai -le.
I GEN bike BEI he GEN bike bump:damage :COM

My bike was broken in a collision with his.
(ii) Xiangpian bei xiao meimei si - le.
photos BEI little sister tear : COM
The photos were torn up by my little sister.

(iii) *Fangzi bei ta da-sao - le. (NOT ADVERSATIVE)
house BEI he sweep:clean :COM

(NP<sub>P</sub> + GEN) NP<sub>POSS</sub> BEI NP<sub>AN</sub> VP<sub>COM</sub>
(Person A) Thing X Person B

Thinking of this thing (X)
which can be thought of as belonging to
person A

I say:

Something happened to X (event Y)
because person B did something to X
I'm thinking of Y as something serious and something
that was bad for person A

### 2.2.3 The Adversative *Bei* Passive with a Natural Force

In this construction, a place or locale is designated by
the syntactic subject and the "agent" is no longer a person but a
natural force such as the wind, rain or floods.

These structural differences are instrumental in
producing a semantic structure markedly different from the other
three passives with *bei* that have animate agents. The predicate of
this passive is one of pure event, as without an animate agent, a
transitive verb of intentional action is subsequently superfluous.
The construction thus comprises only one entity, and may be
considered "agentless" semantically.

172. Qunian qiutian zanmen cunr bei hongshui yan -le.
last year autumn our village BEI floods submerge:COM
In autumn of last year our village was submerged by
floods.
Neither do non-adversative events occur in this passive
in line with the general prediction for _bei_ constructions made in
(1.1).

173. *Zhuangjia bei yu jiu - le.
crops BEI rain save :COM

This passive expresses natural disasters and catastrophes
which occur to the detriment of the social group speakers associate
a certain place with rather than to the detriment of a particular
individual. The people who are adversely affected are those who
live in the place where the disaster occurs or are considered to own
or be connected in some way to whatever is destroyed by it.

ADVERSATIVE BEI PASSIVE WITH A NATURAL FORCE

NP<sub>LOC</sub> = a noun phrase designating a place or a locale

NP<sub>F</sub> = a noun phrase designating a natural force or phenomenon

NP<sub>LOC</sub> BEI NP<sub>F</sub> VP<sub>COM</sub>
Place L

(i) Zhengge gongchang bei huo shao-diao - le.
whole CL factory BEI fire burn:away : COM
The entire factory was burnt down by the fire.

(ii) Zhuangjia bei yu lin-huai - le.
crops BEI rain soak:damage:COM
The crops were made sodden by the rain.
(iii) *Xiao lu bei feng gua-jing - le shuye. (NOT ADVERSATIVE)

path BEI wind blow:clean:COM leaves

Thinking of this place L

I say:

Something happened in this place (L) (event Y)
not because someone did something to L

I'm thinking of Y as something serious and
something that was bad for the people
associated with place L.
### 3. THE ADVERSATIVE _BEI_ PASSIVE OF BODILY EFFECT

A complex predicate is frequently found to co-occur with the _bei_ passive, to be precise, one where a postverbal noun is present.¹ According to the semantic nature of these complex predicates, distinct subconstructions of the _bei_ passive can be singled out, a task which is carried out in the first section of this chapter.

The passive of bodily effect expresses an inalienable relation in terms of the part-whole dichotomy, in this construction, with the subject representing the 'whole' and the postverbal noun, the 'part'. In the detailed discussion of the semantic structure of this passive which ensues, it will be shown that this 'part' is always a part of the body.

In the first section, syntactic evidence is presented to argue the case that only body part terms can fill the position of postverbal noun. The semantic characterisation of the part-whole relation as one holding exclusively between a person and a part of the body is shown to be syntactically justified and this leads to the exclusion of idioms and V-O compounds from this construction. Other analyses on this topic are referred to at this point as well.

1. The same syntactic construction can be also found with _rang_. However, the _rang_ passive of bodily effect will not be separately discussed in this chapter nor in the chapter on the _rang_ passive. The analysis of the complex predicate involving a body part term presented here is meant to apply to the corresponding _rang_ passive as well. The passive marker _jiao_ is unable to form a construction of this type, the reasons for which are given in the chapter below on the _jiao_ passive and the _jiao_ causatives.

I would like to thank Barry Blake, Tim Shopen and Sandra Thompson for their comments and criticism of an earlier draft of this chapter.
That the resultative verb compound denoting the action
and the state resulting from the passive event is an obligatory
syntactic feature of this construction but not of the regular
passive is one of the aspects of the syntactic differentiation
carried out in Section 3.2. Here the two passive constructions are
semantically differentiated as well and the more stringent syntactic
requirements of the bodily effect passive shown to be due to the
more specific semantics of the latter.

In Sections 3.3 and 3.4, the passive construction is
compared with and contrasted to dative constructions in four
European languages: French, German, Italian and Polish. Semantic
evidence as opposed to syntactic evidence in Section 3.1 is used to
establish conclusively that the postverbal noun may only denote a
body part.

In Section 3.5, the possibility of modification of the
body part term is investigated and found to be proscribed and in the
last section, the kind of body part permitted is shown to be
restricted to those thought of as 'tangible' and 'highly functional'.
## 3.1 THE SYNTAX OF THE PASSIVE OF BODILY EFFECT

The passive of bodily effect is of this form:

NP<sub>P</sub>      BEI      NP<sub>P</sub>      V<sub>R</sub>      LE <u>LE</u>      N<sub>BP</sub>
(undergoer)    (agent)    (body part)
'WHOLE'         'PART'

1. Ta bei diren da-shang -le tui.

he BEI enemy hit:wound:COM leg

He was leg wounded through the enemy's firing.²

The reason why this construction is often called the '<u>bei</u>' passive with a retained object' is that when the active counterpart of this sentence is passivized, the body part term remains in its original position, following the verb and hence 'retained' in contrast to the noun denoting the person, the actual undergoer of the event, which is pulled out of the possessive NP and transposed to the head of the sentence as the new subject.³ Compare (1) above with its active form (2) below and also with the regular passive form in (3) which may be generated from the basic S-V-O word order, when the whole possessive NP <u>ta de tui</u> 'his leg' is made into the new subject, the noun designating the body part not being 'left behind' in its original postverbal position:

2. The translations given for all the examples of the passives of bodily effect are literal rather than fluent in order to capture the notion of the body part term indicating the extent of the injury befalling the subject.

3. Dai baoliu binyu de beizi ju - "The <u>bei</u> passive with a retained object" is the name given to this construction by Lu Shu-xiang in "Notes on Language" (1965). Wang Li (1944, p.183) calls it liucun mudiyu 'retained object' too but discards this label as he believes that the Chinese construction does not resemble the English retained object at all.
Active S-V-O:

2. <u>Diren da-shang - le ta de tui.</u>
enemy hit:wound:COM he GEN leg

The enemy wounded his leg.

Regular Passive with possessive NP as subject:

3. <u>Ta de tui bei diren da-shang - le.</u>
he GEN leg BEI enemy hit:wound:COM
His leg was wounded through the enemy's firing.

Thus in (1), the passive of bodily effect separates the
'owner' from the body part by placing the former in the position of
subject at the beginning of the sentence, while leaving the thing
'possessed' at the end of the sentence in its original position.

<u>Bei</u> sentences of this type where the subject denotes a person form the topic of this chapter. Two other kinds of <u>bei</u> sentence with a postverbal noun do exist however and should be mentioned here as they too, express a part-whole relationship. The first kind has an inanimate entity for its subject:

4. <u>Zhuozi bei ta nong-duan -le tuir.</u>
table BEI he do:break : COM leg
The table had one of its legs broken by him.

5. <u>Neike guoshu bei ta bo-qu - le shupi.</u>
that:CL fruit:tree BEI he peel:off:COM bark
That tree had its bark ripped off by him.
Examples of this construction are rare. Consequently, it
is difficult to ascertain if they are cases of personification or
form a separate construction.<fnref n="4" />

The second kind of _bei_ sentence forms a partitive passive
and is more common. It may have either an inanimate or animate
entity as its subject provided it is 'collective' in nature. In
addition, the verb complement contains, not a postverbal noun, but a
numeral and a noun classifier (or measure word) following the verb.

Lü Shuxiang also considers this to be one of the three
kinds of "second object" which can be found in _bei_ sentences. He
states (1965:289) that:

> A measure word as object restricts the quantity
> of the subject of _bei_ ...

> There is the relation of either full or partial
> reference between them.

6. Sanlian jundui bei youjidui xiaomie - le lianglian.
three:CL army BEI guerrilla annihilate : COM two:CL

Two of the army's three companies were annihilated by the
guerrillas.

This kind of _bei_ sentence, similarly, does not come under
discussion here.

Previous analyses of the 'retained object' construction
may be broadly divided into two kinds: those taking a semantic
approach such as Rajskaja (1958) and Guo Derun (1981) and those

<footnote n="4">4 It was extremely difficult to elicit examples of this
construction from informants and in fact, I obtained more
starred examples than acceptable ones.</footnote>
taking a syntactic approach, for example, Lü Shuxiang (1965), Wang Huan (1957) and Wang Li (1944).<fnref n="5" />

Those linguists adopting a semantically oriented approach and even in some cases a purely syntactic approach in the analysis of this construction, agree that the retained object is 'related to' the undergoer, which is denoted by the subject, for example, Wang Li (1944:183) and the Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica (Zhongguo Kexueyuan Yuyansuo 1953:31).

Guo Derun goes one step further, describing this construction in the following way (1981:33):

[U]nder certain special conditions, the verb of the *bei* sentence may take an object, especially when the subject and the object are both undergoers... Some grammar books call the subject of this kind of sentence an 'indirect undergoer' and the object, the 'direct undergoer'. Between the direct and indirect undergoer there is a possessive relationship.

Guo uses the following sentence to exemplify these remarks (my numbering):

7. Ta wei le baohu jiti yangqun, bei caoyuan de she for:sake:of protect collective sheep: BEI plains REL flock
baofengxue dong-huai - le shuang shou.
snowstorm freeze:damage : COM both hands

For the sake of the collective sheep flock, she was both hands frostbitten in the snowstorm on the plains.

Guo claims that *ta* 'she' and *shuang shou* 'both hands' are both undergoers of the verb *dong-huai* 'freeze:damage', since both NPs can serve as subjects of the regular passive:

<footnote n="5">5 Sandra A. Thompson in "Transitivity and some problems with the *ba* construction" (JCL 1:2) also examines the retained object construction but with reference to *ba* sentences and not to *bei*. Wang Huan (1957) and Lü Shuxiang (1965) consider the 'retained object' in both *ba* and *bei* sentences.</footnote>
8. ta bei dong-huai - le
she BEI freeze:damage : COM
She was frostbitten.

9. shuang shou bei dong-huai - le.
both hands BEI freeze:damage:COM
Both hands were frostbitten.

Guo's analysis needs to be refined: There is only one undergoer - the person denoted by the subject. The fact that the body part undergoes the same passive event can be explained in terms of the inalienable relationship, that is, the complete identification of the body part with the person. The body part does not constitute a second and separate undergoer.

Of even greater interest, is Rajskaja's classification of this kind of *bei* sentence into two groups on a semantic basis (1958:223-4): The first group consists of verbs of giving and taking which govern two objects, the direct object being retained in the passive predicate. The second group has an object in the predicate which she says represents an "inalienable possession". Rajskaja also states that this is "usually a part of the person".

In the following discussion of the syntax of this passive construction, I show to the contrary that verbs of giving and taking may be classified in with the regular passive on syntactic grounds. Secondly, I argue that inalienable possession is unconditionally conceptualized in terms of parts of the body by this construction.

Lü Shuxiang's article "Notes on Language" (1965) adopts the purely formal approach in analysis of this construction and so deserves attention in this section on the syntactic configuration of the passive of bodily effect.