A Contrastive Study of the Passive Voice in Journal Articles in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics

Abstract

The passive voice is an important construction for packaging information. Many textbooks, style manuals or academic papers, however, offer different or even contradictory advice on the use of passives. Previous findings show that passives exhibit disciplinary variation, thus special treatment should be given to different disciplines. However, even within the same discipline, such as linguistics, there are different types of academic writing, namely theoretical articles versus empirical ones. To test whether a difference in the use of passives exists between these two sub-disciplines, the passives in articles sampled from Language and Applied Linguistics are counted and compared. The results show that applied linguistics articles demonstrate a significantly higher (Sig. = .000, p < .001) occurrence of passives than theoretical ones.

Classification and Extraction of Appositives based on English and Chinese Bilingual Corpus

“…The establishment of the English-Chinese corpus [1] can provide a research platform to study the syntactic and semantic attributes of the English-Chinese sentences and the similarities and differences between English and Chinese. The abundant language information resources and corpus extraction in corpus not only provide language materials for both English and Chinese teaching [2,3,4], but also promote the development of machine translation [5]. The summarized appositive modes of English and Chinese structures have direct application value in English and Chinese translation.…”