Chinese Passives: Transformational or Lexical?

Within the framework of Universal Grammar, differences in the syntactic function of verbs in a language may be attributed to their lexical representations. English passives have been analyzed in two ways: Certain passives are lexically derived, where passive verbs exhibit the properties of adjectives; other passives are derived transformationally, where passive verbs undergo syntactic movement. In this paper, we propose that different derivations of English passives are not language-specific properties. These differences are observed in other languages such as Hebrew (Borer and Wexler [1]), and Chinese. Chinese passives vary in that the syntactic realization reflects lexical properties of the verbs in question. Lexical meaning may determine the form of the associated syntactic constructions. Certain verbs in Chinese passives are verbal in nature, whereas others are adjectival in nature. In order to illustrate the lexical and syntactic derivations of Chinese passives, we shall attempt to distinguish between the essential properties of Chinese verbs and adjectival verbs in the first part of this paper. In the latter part of the paper, comparisons are made between two syntactically different types of Chinese passives. The similarities between the constructions of adjectival verbs and Type II passives indicate that certain Chinese passives are lexical, while others are transformationally derived.