Passive voice - Курсовая работа

The descriptive and deductive approach is applied in the theory revision to come to the nature of passive voice in English and Vietnamese. The translation is used in the contrast of the English passive noun phrase/ the Vietnamese passive noun phrase and the pragmatic effects of the English passive/ Vietnamese equivalents 5. Design of the study The paper is divided into three main parts: the Introduction, the Development, and the Conclusion. The Introduction briefly introduces the thesis. The Development has four chapters: Chapter one starts with the concept of voice in general and passive voice in particular. Chapter two deals with the English passive and chapter three is with the Vietnamese passive. The contrastive analysis in chapter four points out the difference in English and Vietnamese passive constructions syntactically semantically and pragmatically. The final part is to find out the factors decisive to the choice between Vietnamese passive constructions and other Vietnamese substitutional structures. Part three is the conclusion which summarizes the achievement in the thesis. Part Two: Development Chapter One: Theoretical Background 1.1 Concept of voice in languages According to the authors of the Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, the term voice, in a narrow sense, refers to morphological categories. However, in English and Vietnamese, verbs do not have distinct morphological categories for difference voices. Therefore, as Asher R.E believed, in these languages, “voice are defined in terms of syntactic constructions with reference to specific grammatical characteristics” and “voice can be understood as a system of correlation between semantic roles such as agent and patient and between grammatical functions such as subjects and objects ” 1.2 Active voice and passive voice syntactically, semantically and pragmatically viewed From the syntactic aspect, the opposition between active voice and passive voice can be seen in the movement of constituents in the linear order and correlation between grammatical functions such as subject and object. From the semantic aspect, it is the correlation between semantic roles such as agent and patient. From the pragmatics aspect, the passive voice is in greater interest, which includes the pragmatic function and the pragmatic aspect. The pragmatic function is related to the passive sentence’s frequency in different type of texts. The pragmatic aspect is concerned with agent demotion (agent defocusing)/patient promotion and agent promotion which unifies passive construction with other construction such as the plural (in English), the honorific (in French), the indefinite person constructions (in English). 1.3 Voice and related concept The concept in analysis in this thesis is the Information structure. The information unit is a unit of information. The information unit is a structure made up of two functions, the New and the Given. From the point of view of Information structure at the sentence level, the New Information is the information considered New to the hearer and the Old information is the already existing stock of knowledge in the hearer’s mind. In English, Passive constructions allow the New information at the following part of the sentence as the late news, which follows the universal rule of the Given being followed by the New information. 1.4 English verbs Under different approaches with different criteria, the system of English verbs is differently classified under different labels. The main part presented here is taken from Quirk R., et al.