The Semantic Preferences and Semantic Prosody of Bei Passives — A corpus-based contrastive study
Zhu Yi-fa · Waiguoyu · 2014
Based on a systematic comparison of the semantic preferences and semantic prosody of bei( 被) passives in two comparable corpora,namely the Corpus of E-C Translated News Articles and the Corpus of Non-translated Chinese News Articles,this paper explores the semantic changes of bei( 被) passives in translated Chinese and analyses the causes of such changes. Methodologically,this study demonstrates that semantic preference and semantic prosody can be exploited fruitfully in carrying out investigations of semantic features that typically occur in translated rather than non-translated texts.