Information Structure in Passive: Focusing on Topicality and the End-Focus Principle

초록

The present study aims to identify the causes of passives and investigate the information structure of the passive from authentic data through the use of a corpus. 1,000 passive sentences are extracted from the BNC. 821 passive sentences are classified as topicality, 153 passive sentences as connectedness, and 26 passive sentences as circumstances dependency. In addition, there exist 732 short passives and agent omissions, whereas there exist 268 long passives with by-agent. Among 268 L-type passive sentences, the number of sentences where passive subjects are old information is 226, while the number of sentences where passive subjects are new information is 42. This study shows that topicality, connectedness, and circumstances dependency are the causes of passives, but the subject of the passive is topic, or old information. In the end-focus principle, on the other hand, ‘by-agent’ is mostly new information. Old information comes first, followed by new information, which is unmarked.

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