The passive voice of subjective experience and objective response

Abstract The passive voice in Chinese is the focus of extensive research seeking to understand its diverse discourse functions. Adopting a corpus-assisted approach, this paper brings attention to an underexplored category of passives — Chinese lexical passive constructions (LPCs) — and analyzes the semantic and pragmatic aspects of the zāo, shòu , and dédào structures. Quantitative and qualitative analysis helps to identify the semantic frames triggered by each LPC, highlighting potential differences in how events are conceptualized. Based on evidence from three corpora representing distinct discourse domains, the paper contends that LPCs differ in the range of events they represent as well as the affective valence they convey. As such, they constitute three distinct ways of conceptualizing the effects of an action, allowing the speaker to express their subjective-objective response to the event. This supports the unique form-function relationship of each LPC and informs the pragmatic implications involved in their selection.