The Passive Voice

[rmpalpha]

I am currently a first-year student, and my class is currently going over Lesson 25 in the New Practical Chinese Reader. This lesson introduces the passive construction - my teacher typically gives a more detailed grammar explanation to accompany the text, and we went over constructions with 被/让/叫 in class today.

This whole concept of the passive construction confuses me, honestly. I've searched the threads here, and it seems that there are a whole bunch of other passive constructions in the Chinese language (which confuses me more), but that the Chinese language doesn't really have a passive voice (what?).

Here are some examples from the handout that my teacher prepared for the class, and my comments (please excuse any grammatical mistakes on my part):

我的自行车被我弟弟骑走了。

My bicycle was ridden away by my little brother.

This sounds quite awkward in English. Why not "我弟弟把我的自行车骑走了" - "My brother rode away on my bike"?

你的自行车经常被谁骑坏?

Your bike is often broken by whom?

This sounds like a more reasonable phrase in English - but why not "谁经常骑坏你的自行车?" - "Who often breaks your bike?"

王教授被学生请去吃午饭了。

Professor Wang was invited to lunch by his students.

I think this is one of the most reasonable English sentences from the handout. From that standpoint, the emphasis rests on the action - the professor was invited - rather than who made the invitation. Does this same emphasis exist in Chinese (which might give rise to a reason to actually use the construction)?

Note: I realize that my comments may suggest that I generally try to find a relationship between English (my native language) and Chinese language concepts. This is not necessarily the case - I am just trying to find logical applications of the 被 construction, and the only logic that I can find comes from languages that I know how to use already (such as English).

Anyway, I guess my main question is this - how often is the 被 construction used in Chinese? From what I've read on the forums, it seems like a construction that comes up more in English-Chinese translations than in anything else, since English apparently uses passive sentences much more than Chinese. So does that mean that I should just not add this pattern to the ones that I already know?

Also, I am a scientist, and experimental procedures in English are laden with passive sentences (X was dissolved in water and added dropwise to a stirring solution of Y that was previously cooled to 0ºC). I'm wondering whether this is the case in Chinese also.

Thanks for your time!

[creamyhorror]

被/让/叫/gei3 are very common, and you absolutely should know how to use them. 被 generally implies "got Xed by Y", e.g. "He got/was knocked down by a car" = 他被车撞倒了. 被 shifts the focus from the subject (the car) to the object (him).

[skylee]

Anyway, I guess my main question is this - how often is the 被 construction used in Chinese? From what I've read on the forums, it seems like a construction that comes up more in English-Chinese translations than in anything else, since English apparently uses passive sentences much more than Chinese. So does that mean that I should just not add this pattern to the ones that I already know?

I often have to vet Chinese translation of English documents (I myself can't translate them, though), and I've noted that our translators often replace passive voice sentences in English with non-passive voice sentences in Chinese. A former translator friend has told me that the rule is to use active voice as far as possible. But then I think this would often involve adding information that is not in the original (or deliberately left out). This is interesting, but could also be a problem.

The same friend said once that they had to avoid 被 like the plague (sounds like it is the rule). But when it is unavoidable, sometimes she would use 獲 instead.

[xiaocai]

I guess it is partly because that most of the time you can drop the subject of a sentence Chinese and it will still sound alright, so passive voice is not so useful as it is in English.

[Don_Horhe]

I remember reading somewhere that the passive voice in Chinese, unlike in English, for example, is traditionally used for bad things, things which the speaker wishes have not happened. With the increased number of translated foreign literature, though, the usage of the passive voice has broadened and is now used not only under the aforementioned circumstances, especially in everyday spoken language. I'm assuming that once one gets more formal, one has to use the passive exclusively for unpleasant or undesired actions.

[renzhe]

Why? Style, or emphasis. Just like in any other language. You're saying the same thing, but in a different way.

But skylee is right -- the passive voice is far more common in some languages than others, and Chinese doesn't seem to use it too often. Still, you should know it.

Keep in mind that in the north, you might hear 受 in speech instead of 被.

[rmpalpha]

Thank you, everyone, for your responses! I will, of course, need to learn the 被 construction for my class, but it is good to see that this construction at least gets some use in the language.

Now, I gave three sentences as examples of the 被 construction. Which of the three sentences (if any) would it be better to use the active voice to say the same thing? In English, I would personally only use the passive voice for the last sentence because the other two sentences sound quite awkward to me. I know this is more of a stylistic question, but I'm still curious.

[natra]

I am actually really wondering about 被. I know that we will always translate it into the passive voice in English, although once a former teacher of mine mentioned in passing that 被 is not necessarily considered passive in Chinese. Has anyone ever heard of this??

[renzhe]

To be honest, these sentences do sound like somebody was trying to construct sentences using 被. You don't have to use the passive voice there. Whether it makes more sense to use the passive voice will depend on the context. If you want to concentrate on professor Wang, then you would use the passive voice here to keep him central to the story. Just like you would in English.

[Altair]

This whole concept of the passive construction confuses me, honestly. I've searched the threads here, and it seems that there are a whole bunch of other passive constructions in the Chinese language (which confuses me more), but that the Chinese language doesn't really have a passive voice (what?).

I think the simple answer to this is: yes, Chinese doesn't really have a passive voice. Chinese, like many other languages, does not have verb endings or special constructions solely dedicated to making a sentence passive in meaning. Instead, it has a range of expressions that have their own uses and connotations and that sometime can be used to give a feeling similar to the English passive. Even a language as close to English as Spanish has three different expressions that could correspond to "the door was opened"; whereas Chinese would probably use no special construction at all in this case. It's a case of apples and oranges.

[Don_Horhe]

Ok, I dug up the things I've been reading and it seems that I got my facts a bit mixed up in my previous post.

Sun Chaofen, Chinese: A Linguistic Introduction, p. 25:

It has also been noted that Chinese syntax, to a certain extent, has also been influenced by Western languages such as the extensive use of relative clauses, and passive constructions, in modern Chinese (Li and Thompson 1981).

p. 211:

Bèi 被, unlike other passive markers, a verb meaning “to suffer/to receive” in Old Chinese, has practically lost all of its ability to function as a verb in modern Chinese (Sun 1996). Furthermore, the Chinese passive of one of these markers almost always implies a sense of adversity, or misfortune.

Li and Thompson, Mandarin Chinese - A Functional Reference Grammar, p. 493:

The bèi passive in Mandarin, like those of Japanese, Vietnamese, Thai, and other Asian languages, is used essentially to express an adverse situation, one in which something unfortunate has happened.

p. 495:

First of all, it has been often noted that the message carried by passive sentences with verbs of perception or cognition is unfortunate or pejorative, whereas the meanings of their verbs are neutral.

p. 496:

Second, it has been observed by practically all Chinese grammarians that the number of bèi constructions that do not express diversity is increasing, particularly in the written language of modern China. This increase in the nonadversity usage of the bèi constructions in modern Chinese is clearly due to the influence of the Indo-European languages, especially English.

There's more, but I'm not going to quote everything. What I do want to quote (I promise, this is the last one), though, is the passage about the non-correspondence between the Mandarin and English passive on page 498:

The third point to be made is that it has been observed that the English passive often does not correspond to the bèi construction in Mandarin. In other words, what is normally best translated into an English passive sentence is often not a bèi sentence in Mandarin, and, conversely, an English passive sentence often does not translate into a bèi sentence in Mandarin.

What I had gotten wrong in my previous post was that the nonadversity usage of the passive initially increased in the written language and was initially, as Yuenren Chao puts it, "unpalatable to most people and no one talks in that way yet". It wasn't until later on that this usage was adopted by the spoken language as well.