How is passive voice used differently in Chinese than English?

[tooironic]

I was just thinking about how passive voice is used differently in Chinese than English.

 

I'd like to collect some examples. So far I've come up with these:

 

這都被你發現了。Literally: This was discovered by you. In other words: So you managed to figure that one out.
我被她看到了。Literally: I was seen by her. In other words: She saw me.

我的事情被朋友說出去了。Literally: My matter was revealed by my friends. In other words: My friends blurted out something about me.

 

As you can see, the literal translations sound strange. I think this reveals how different English uses passive voice than Chinese. But I'm not sure how to explain this difference.

 

Any ideas, or other examples?

 

Thanks.

[realmayo]

Was reading that 被 is a fairly new word in Chinese introduced a hundred years ago in order to translate Western languages' use of the passive. Much of the time the fact that something's passive does not need to be explicitly made clear via grammar such as 被.

& it's usually used for when unfortunate stuff happens.

Something positive like to be promoted is usually "he was promoted" in English, in Chinese I guess it's more often something like 得到提升. Or, When the proposal was released, ... -> 这项提案公布后,.... No need for any word to explicitly show we're doing passive voice in that last one.

[anonymoose]

I think in the three sentences you gave, it is used to imply dissatisfaction with the fact being stated.

[Hofmann]

 

 

Was reading that 被 is a fairly new word in Chinese introduced a hundred years ago in order to translate Western languages' use of the passive.

Where did you read that?

 

被 as a verb can mean "encounter," "reach," or "suffer." 國語辭典 has citations from 史記 and 孟子. Because of this "suffer" definition the patient usually suffers in sentences that use passive voice.

[realmayo]

Here http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887323874204578219832868014140 but I wrote very clumsily, I meant that it's usage as an equivalent for the English passive voice is new, the character of course is not and it's earlier usage clearly shows why it was chosen. Nice neatness with the English where the word 'passive' = 'suffer'.

[dnevets]

I've noticed that whenever I write something on Lang-8 using 被 for passive voice the corrections I'm given change the whole sentence - no passive, no 被. Is it fair to assume that passives just aren't used as often in Chinese as in English?

[skylee]

Yes.

[Nathan Mao]

连城诀 by 金庸 was filled with passive voice construction.  Interestingly, he used 给 for 被。

So when he said A 给 B 打了鼻子流血, he actually was writing that B hit A and made his nose bleed. I read the first 20% of the book before I realized this, and was really confused by reading it with a more modern understanding of 给, i.e. A gave B a bloody nose.

 

The thing about Chinese grammar patterns is they are all designed to emphasize certain points and de-emphasize certain points.

 

So the use of 被 is to emphasize what was done, and to who, but to de-emphasize who actually did it.  If you want to emphasize who did an action, you'd just use SVO and be done with it.

 

So if I want to use 被, it would be more like 我姐被甩了！　　In this case, there's only one person who could have broken up with her: her boyfriend.  So since it is the recipient of the action and the action itself that matters, you could and probably would use 被 in this case.

Because the non-passive way to say this would be: 我姐的男朋友甩了她！ And that just is unnecessarily complicated, with "my sister" being referenced twice just to get the point across...and the important thing is that she got dumped, so why mention him prominently.

 

The other reason I would use 被 is to emphasize complete and total passiveness.  有人撞了我的车 is that another care hit me while I was driving, but 我的车被撞了 carries with it an idea that my car was just sitting there when it got hit.  Maybe while I was at a stop sign, or even more likely, some crazy drunk idiot hit it while it was parked in my driveway for the night!

[tooironic]

@realmayo I think you are mistaken re 提升/升官. "He was promoted" is usually expressed as 他提升了/他升官了. There is no need for any other verb as 提升/升官 already are verbs. And believe it or not, they are acting in the passive voice here. Remember 被 is not always needed to create a passive voice construction in Chinese.

 

Also, I believe the idea that passive voice is usually used to express negative outcomes is a bit misleading. Examples of neutral sentences using passive voice in Chinese are easy enough to find. Consider 他被選為主席 ("He was elected chairperson"), 她總被認作是漂亮的小女孩 ("She has always been considered a pretty girl"), 他被任命為秘書 ("He was appointed secretary"), 她受到大家的崇拜 ("She was adored by everyone"),

 

@dnevets I think that's a big assumption. It could be just that you were simply using 被 incorrectly. For example you could have said something like 我被中毒了 instead of 我中毒了 (the former is considered incorrect by educated Chinese). I've had the opposite experience to you; many times I have been told I should have used 被 when I didn't. So I can't help but feel that there is something else going on here rather than "English uses it more than Chinese" which seems dubious.

 

@Nathan Mao Your description of passive voice is spot-on of course, but all of those could be reasons for using passive voice in English as much as Chinese. What I was hoping I could find were the differences in passive voice usage between the two languages. As my examples in my OP suggested, Chinese uses it in a way that English would rarely do.

[realmayo]

tooironic, that's what I mean, the use of 被 or other explicitly let-me-put-this-verb-into-the-passive-voice bits of grammar are less needed than would be the case in English.

 

As for whether you can add up the times an explicit to-passive word like 被 comes up rather than the meaning being communicated less explicitly, versus the number of times that happens in English, I think there's no way to answer that question to anyone's satisfaction, would need a pretty impressive corpus, or rather, a pretty impressive corpus would be required.

[tooironic]

True. I guess I should have stated more explicitly that I'm not just talking about 被 but passive voice in all its manifestations. And I'm not really asking about the frequency of use but rather how it is used differently than English - this question to me is much more interesting.

[daofeishi]

An interesting example that I heard from an irritated 服务员 the other day is （我）又被逃单了. In English the passive voice usually reverses subject and direct object, but 逃单 is a verb phrase and doesn't take another object. I have heard 被 used like that before as well, similarly to the American "to be V. on", but I can't come up with any other good examples right now. I.e. 又被逃单了 = "I was dine-and-dashed on again". 

[Baron]

@tooironic

 

Some differences between 被 and English passives

 

In Chinese there are more ways to express passive than in English. For one, you don't need a grammatical passive marker if the verbs make it obvious that it's a passive e.g. 问题解决了 the problem has been solved ('notional passive').  Then you can go all formal and use a nominalised verbal object e.g. 问题得到了解决 'the problem received a solution' ('lexical passive'). I think that one only counts as a passive because the subject it the 'receiver' of the action. Thirdly you can use 被 ('formal passive') e.g. 问题终于被解决了 the problem has finally been solved.

 

Furthermore you can further avoid 被 by using 让，叫 or  给 instead.

 

Another notable difference is that you can also use 被 to emphasise the subject is the sufferer of adversity. eg 我被小偷偷了钱包 'I was by the thief stolen wallet', which we have to use 'get/have' for (I got/had my wallet stolen).

 

Here are some more cool things you can do in Chinese but not English to make passive - 汽车加了油了 literally 'the car added gas' - The car has been fuelled. 土豆削了皮了 lit. 'the potato peeled skin', or 'the potato has been peeled'. It's basically the notional passive again.

[realmayo]

 I'm not really asking about the frequency of use but rather how it is used differently than English

I think Baron explains it well: often the meaning is passive but there is no grammatical marker, so grammatical markers are used less frequently, but that very fact is a 'how' difference. 

 

English can do it a bit, although some purists frown. e.g. 'the deal priced', 'the car sold for more than I expected'

[Michaelyus]

 

The first obvious difference, as noted previously, is that syntactic passives are by far more frequent in English than in Chinese.

...

The agent in the long passive in English is introduced by by, which is left out together with the agent in the short passive. In Chinese the agent is introduced by bei in the long passive while in short passive, only the agent, but not bei, is omitted because bei plays the double role of marking passive constructions as well as introducing the agent...Short passives typically account for over 90% of total occurrences of be/get passives in both written and spoken English... In Chinese, as noted earlier, three of out of the five syntactic passive markers (wei…suo, jiao and rang) only occur in long passives. For the two remaining passive markers bei and gei which allow both long and short passives, the proportions of short passives (60.7% and 57.5% respectively) are significantly lower than those for English passives.

...

A major distinction between passive constructions in the two languages under consideration is that Chinese passives are more frequently used with an inflictive meaning than English passives...In conclusion, positive categories of passive constructions are least frequent in both languages while the difference consists in how much negativity is coded in them.

...

The contexts where bare passives occur as predicates are also the same as those which encourage omission of aspect markers in Chinese discourse in general. In English, the interaction between passives and aspect is not so apparent as in Chinese because all English sentences and clauses are formally marked by combined tense-aspect markers.

...

Passives in English occur more frequently in informative than imaginative genres. Official documents and academic prose, in particular, show very high proportions of passives. In contrast, these two genres have the lowest proportions of passives in Chinese, where mystery/detective stories and religious writing show exceptionally high proportions of passives... Of the 16 genres under consideration, short passives are predominant in all genres in English but there are considerable variations in Chinese, where long passives appear to be used in speech and colloquial genres and short passives are typical in written genres.

 

McEnery, A. M., and R. Z. Xiao. "Passive constructions in English and Chinese: A corpus-based contrastive study." Proceedings from the Corpus Linguistics Conference Series. Vol. 1. No. 1. 2005.

[Baron]

@realmayo

 

If someone frowns on 'the car sold for more than expected' you out-pedant them, because it's an example of the crappy English version of the 'middle voice'. Stuff like 'the meat cooked well', 'the car drives fast', 'the pen writes well', 'the orange peels easily'. They're pretty weird - what the hell was the meat cooking? What was the pen writing, the car driving etc.

 

Chinese does something more crazy than that, you can use an object “这个药会吃死你” lit 'This medicine can eat you to death' This medicine can kill you. That's not a middle voice construction though, that's just Chinese being odd.