Passive constructions in Mandarin Chinese and European Portuguese a contrastive descriptive perspective

Abstract

This investigation focuses on the structural, semantic and aspectual properties of passive in Mandarin Chinese (MC) and European Portuguese (EP) from a descriptive perspective. The findings reveal systematic divergences between the two systems. MC passives can be overtly marked by bei or remain unmarked, relying on the semantic tendency and semantic role between patient and agent. While agent omission alone preserves the bei-passive construction, the simultaneous deletion of both the agent and the bei marker yields an unmarked passive with fundamentally different structural and semantic properties. In contrast, EP agent omission merely alternates between long and short forms of a unified structure. Aspectually, MC passives exhibit covert properties requiring inferential interpretation, demonstrating flexibility in combining with aspectual particles—a pattern absent in EP's morphologically-marked system. This contrast reflects a deeper asymmetry: MC passives are primarily lexically governed, while EP passives rely predominantly on morphological inflection. These divergent realization mechanisms can be traced to underlying typological differences—MC's topic-prominence and morphological minimality versus EP's subject-prominence and rich inflectional morphology. By examining how these typological properties specifically constrain passive constructions, this study contributes to understanding the interaction between morphological systems, lexical mechanisms, and passive realization across typologically distinct languages.