proto-southwestern-tai revised: a new reconstruction - seals 22

Vietnamese Passive 107
Lê Xuân Thại (1989) also has a similar view when he claims that even though
Vietnamese does not have passive sentences completely similar to those in inflecting
languages, it does have sentences which could be characterized passive with the following
characteristics:
- The subject denotes patient rather than the agent.
- The predicate is appended by được or bị.
- The predicate may be followed by a clause. For example:
(1) Em học sinh này được cô giáo khen
adr. student this get teacher appraise
This student is appraised by the teacher.
(2) Thành phố Vinh bị máy bay giặc tàn phá
city Vinh suffer airplane enemy destroy
Vinh city is destroyed by enemy planes.
He also acknowledges that được, bị could be absent from passive sentences, for example:
(3) Bữa cơm dọn ra
meal set out
The meal (is) set out.
(4) Ngôi nhà này xây bằng gạch
house this build by bricks
This house (is) built of bricks.
Diệp Quang Ban & Nguyễn Thị Thuận (2000) also support the existence of passive
sentences in Vietnamese. They argue that the passive voice in Vietnamese is not marked in
the form of verbs but in the form of a special syntactic construction with established
grammatical and semantic characteristics. Accordingly, they specify the following
characteristics of Vietnamese passive constructions:
- The appropriate grammatical means for expressing passiveness in Vietnamese are
function words (được, bị) and word order.
- Verbs participating in passive constructions are transitive verbs which have
semantic relations with entities expressed by noun phrases as subjects before
được, bị.
- Semantically, passive sentences have the following structure: i) The subject of the
passive is assigned to the semantic roles of patient, recipient, goal, beneficiary. ii)
The types of states of affairs of passive sentences are actions with two semantic
characteristics: [+dynamic] and [+control].
- Syntactically, passive sentences have two clauses in their construction:
C-V [C-V].