| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立嘉義大學 === 外國語言學系研究所 === 104 === This study used diachronic corpora analysis to investigate the development of adverse reading of the wei…suo passive of archaic Chinese. Adverse reading is quite noticeable in the bei passive of modern Chinese. However, since much diachronic corpora-based research (see Peyraube 1989, Xiao, McEnery, and Qian 2006, Yang
2006 and Kou 2010) has shown that, since the application of adverse reading for the bei passive has already declined, adverse reading is not considered a necessary
condition of the bei passive. Two proposed explanations are proposed to explain this
phenomenon of declination in adverse reading of the bei passive. The first explanation
proposes that the observed decline is a result of language contact (see Wang 1957,
Chao 1968, Li and Thompson 1981, Hashimoto 1988), while the second proposes that
the declination of adverse reading results from internal grammaticalization of bei
passive structures (see Peyraube 2000, Tien 2000, Xing 2003, Yang 2006).
Due to the close relationship between modern Chinese and archaic Chinese, one
type of archaic passive, the wei…suo passive structure, was evaluated in this study. In
this study, the 24 books of the Er Shi Si Shi from the HanDian corpus were selected
for examination. The first 100 sentences of each corpus were selected as entries for
analysis and only main text sentences from the Er Shi Si Shi were searched, with
footnotes excluded. The results demonstrated that adverse reading of the wei…suo
passive construction reached a high of 90% and a low of only 50%. In addition, no
steady increase or decline of the adverse reading was found over time. Moreover,
adverse reading fluctuated irregularly among corpora. Therefore, the findings from
this study support neither proposed explanation, since grammaticalization should lead
to a gradual declination and language contact should result in a dramatic and
permanent declination in adverse reading for passive structures. Further investigation
into adverse reading of archaic Chinese passive constructions is suggested for futureresearch as a possible means for developing feasible explanations for the declination of adverse reading and contributing to the literature in this area.
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