The bei construction: A focus device in Chinese.

摘要

The bei construction has often been identified as a passive construction. This thesis uses Davis's (1983) semantic framework and Hsueh's (1989) descriptive corollaries to account for the various characteristics of the bei construction and proposes that the bei construction is not a passive construction but a more general Focus device.;It is proposed that (1) the bei construction is not a passive construction because it does not always carry a passive sense; (2) bei is a Focus marker; and (3) the complex bei construction shows a cause/result relationship between the two clauses of the proposition rather than a passive sense. In addition, the result clause provides the foreground information, while the causal clause provides the background information. However, the foregrounded result clause departs from normal coding properties of foregrounded clauses because it is lower in transitivity.