2。2 Relavent studies from the perspective of markedness theory 4

2。3 English and Chinese passives 5

3 Theoretical foundation and research metholodogy 7

3。1 The marked and the unmarked 7

3。2 Research metholodogy 7

4 Unmarkedness of English and Chinese passives 10

4。1 Patient animacy 10

4。2 Emotional color 11

4。2 Tense 13From+优!尔.YouErw.com 加QQ75201`8766

Conclusion 15

Acknowledgements 18

References 19

1 Introduction

1。1 Research background 

Markedness is a universal phenomenon existing in almost all languages。 Since markedness was introduced to China in the late 1970s, domestic scholars have made continuous progress in the study of markedness application in many fields, such as phonetics, semantics, and pragmatics。 

In recent years, markedness theory has been applied to analyze differences and similarities of English and Chinese passives。 Passives are always the key points and difficult points for Chinese learners during their process of learning English。 According to Odlin (1989), mother tongue can promote learners’ acquisition of target language when some characteristics of mother tongue are similar to target language, which is called positive transfer。 Otherwise, mother tongue may impede learners’ second language acquisition (SLA), which is negative transfer。 Since English and Chinese passives are quite different and both of them are very complicated, the typical different features of learners’ mother tongue can easily have negative transfer effect on SLA (Fan, 2012)。 When learning a second language, however, it depends on the degree of markedness and unmarkedness that whether mother tongue transfer can happen or not and what kind of transfer will happen (Li, 2012)。 Therefore, it is necessary and helpful to analyze the differences of passives unmarkedness between Chinese and English in order to find ways to promote positive transfer in SLA and translation。 论文网

1。2 Research significance

Although some constrastive studies on Chinese and English markedness phenomena have been conducted, not many scholars study the unmarkedness of Chinese and English passives。 Hence, based on markedness theory and its judgment criteria, this paper endeavors to focus on the unmarkedness of Chinese and English passive sentences from the aspects of patient subject animacy, emotional color, and tense, aiming at contrastively analyzing the different expressions of Chinese and English passives unmarkedness, hoping to propose feasible advice for SLA and learners’ translation practice。

1。3 Thesis organization

This thesis includes five chapters。 The first chapter introduces the background and significance of this study。 The second chapter is literature review, summarizing the development of markedness theory and previous studies conducted on differences of Chinese and English passives as well as the application of markedness theory in English teaching and SLA。 The third chapter sets theoretical framework for the analysis, mainly elaborating the content of markedness theory, judgment criteria, the three analysis aspects, and research corpus。  The forth chapter is about the contrastive analysis of Chinese and English passives from the three aspects。 The last chapter is conclusion of the whole analysis and some implications for SLA and translation。