"Putative passives in Mengzi" (original) (raw)

This dissertation is a multidimensional analysis of a debated topic in Classical Chinese (VI to 111 century b.C.) Syntax, unmarked passive sentences. The main data of the analysis consists of all the sentences with patient subject, with transitive verbs and without passivizing particles, in the text of Mengzi (1V century b.C.). The appropriateness of using such a label, which refers prototypically to European languages with their rich verbal morphology, to describe a very different language situation, has been put into question. A typologically based characterization of passive is proposed, which relies on lexical factors (transitivity), syntactic factors (object deletion and subject properties) and discourse factors (defocusing of the agent, topic properties and parallelism).