MCLC: dissent speaks code (11)

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: wolfgang behr <behr at oas.uzh.ch>
Subject: dissent speaks code (11)
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Dear Costas,

yes, that's the same kind of phenomenon which (Mme.！) Xu Dan describes.
I was using the term "object" for her "noun group" simply since 宾语 is
what our Chinese colleagues usually term it.

On the second (translation) point -- yes, that is well possible. I am
currently travelling and can't check the context from my mobile, but the
way I remember it from Tang's article it indicated an interpretation,
where the "face" was then "wiped clean" in the next sentence. Anyway,
the the only point I wanted to make is that the verb phrase after 被,
however _internally_ constructed, may carry an object.

I haven't really looked into your last question and am certainly no 近代
汉语-specialist. (Everything post-Qin seems pretty "modern" from the
perspective of my Early China home turf). To be sure, any passive is
prone to acquire "inflictive" readings, since the semantic force of the
verb may hit the "undergoer" unrequested and often beyond his/her
control, such that it it will be easy to find pertinent exx. from Early
Middle Chinese and maybe even before with "negative" connotations. As an
impressionistic feeling I would say that the "_usually_ negative"
connotation is especially prominent in Late Middle-Early Modern Chinese
(Song-Yuan-Ming). You may even get sentences where the dominant function
of 被 seems not to be to mark a reversed agent-patient relationship, but
precisely the undesirability, unpleasentness of the described action.

On the other hand, it also seems to be the case that this primarily
negative reading of 被 is lost with the transition into Modern, esp.
20th c. Chinese, where there are clearly a lot of perfectly neutral
readings for 被, most commonly in technical or scientific usage. I
wouldn't be surprised if these neutral usages are described to have
arisen in translation contexts, i.e. under the influence of Western
languages in the scholarly literature (which I haven't studied). Before
jumping to such conclusions, however, one would have to sort out
possible areal influences _preceding_ Western language influence,
especially since the Manchu passive marker -(m)bu- is phonetically close
(but positioned post-verbally), and Korean and Vietnamese seem to have
structurally close passives marked with bi (see on this point 聂志军,
"'被'字被动句研究综述", 内江师范学院学报 11.2008). As Peyraube has shown
very convincingly ("Westernization of Chinese grammar in the 20h
century: Myth or reality?, J. of Ch. Lx., 28.1, 2000) many alleged
instances of Western-language influence on Modern Chinese grammar turn
out to be either inner-Chinese developments in the early modern
vernaculars or due to language contact with "Altaic" and other languages
on closer inspection.

Cheers,
W