ABSTRACT
As noted in Chapter 1, passive constructions play a role similar to that of resultative verb complements (RVCs) in delimiting situations aspectually. For decades, passives as a major grammatical category in both English and Chinese have been subject to much research, both corpus-based and noncorpus-based. A number of contrastive studies of passive constructions in the two languages have also been published, but they have not used corpus data, being based, rather, on a handful of examples which are common to nearly all of those papers (e.g. Fan 1994; Wang 1997; Yu 2001; Zhou and Xia 2002; Gu 2003). The work presented in this chapter exemplifi es once again the use of the corpus methodology from a contrastive perspective, seeking to provide a more systematic account of passive constructions in the two typologically distinct languages on the basis of corpus data.1
