ABSTRACT
It has been widely accepted that cognitive linguistics and linguistic typology are closely related to each other, that is, the former provides an appropriate framework to explain cross-linguistic regularity and the latter serves to prove some theoretical tenets or hypotheses of the former. The central point here is how to understand the so-called cross-linguistic regularities or language universals. Langacker (2013) considers them as syntactic categories such as nouns and verbs, whereas Croft (2016) thinks of them as Greenbergian universal correlations. Through analyzing various types of passive structures across languages that are most diverse among all grammatical categories, this chapter focuses on the limitation of the possible cross-linguistic variation in markings and forms for a given grammatical category, which can be successfully explained by means of the concept “construal”, a central point in cognitive linguistics. On the other side, evidence from linguistic typology shows that every element comprising a construction is meaningful, which validates one of the major tenets of cognitive linguistics.
