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

110 Nguyễn Hồng Cổn
“There is a group of Vietnamese verbs such as cần (need), muốn (want), có thể
(can), toan (intend), định (intend), dám (dare), bị (suffer), được (get, enjoy), etc.,
which clearly have no meanings at all. The lexical meanings of these verbs are very
insignificant, they have been grammaticalized but they have not yet become true
function words. These verbs have very narrow intentions so their extensions should
be broad – they are always accompanied by secondary constituents. While
expressing the meanings of need (cần - need), possibility (có thể - can), intention
(toan – inted to, định – intend, dám – dare), desire (mong -wish, muốn-want),
passiveness (được-get/enjoy; bị - suffer), etc., these verbs are used according to
speakers’s attitudes towards and assessments of the realities. These relations reflect
the subjective consciousness: When we say “Tôi được khen” (I was appraised) or
“Tôi bị phạt” (I am punished), the words được, bị are the grammatical markers of
passiveness, but the passive meaning here could be understood depending on the
nuances of “good luck” or “bad luck”, and the meanings of “good luck” or “bad
luck” are completely dependent on the understanding and assessments of the
speakers. Consequently được, bị have temporarily become modal words…”
(Đinh Văn Đức 1986:139-140).
Agreeing with this explanation, we think the fact that được, bị keep their original lexical
meanings while acting as function words (passive markers) is quite normal in
grammaticalization.
This analysis has highlighted that it is not surprising if được, bị still have the
syntactic attitudes of a lexical verb (as a main verb in the predicates) and still keep their
original lexical meanings (bị means suffering from something unhappy and được means
enjoying something beneficial) while playing the roles of an auxiliary marking
passiveness. According to Keenan (1985: 257-61), in languages with periphrastic passive,
there are at least 4 types of verbs used to mark passive predicates: (i) intensive/relational
verbs (like be in English, byt’ in Russian, être in French, etc.), (ii) giving-receiving verbs
(like the passive constructions with get in English), (iii) motion verbs (like gayee in Hindi),
and (iv) enjoying-suffering verbs (like được, bị in Vietnamese). Clearly, the fact that
Vietnamese uses modal verbs được, bị as auxiliary verbs expressing passiveness is not an
exception.
With the arguments presented above we have come to the following conclusion:
Theoretically and practically we have enough evidence to talk about the presence of
passive sentences in Vietnamese.
2.2 Typology of Vietnamese passive sentences
As presented above, there are different views on passive sentences in Vietnamese. Even
among those who acknowledge passive sentences, there is no consensus as far as their
identifications are concerned. We consider that, just like in other languages, Vietnamese
passive sentences are syntactically transformed from the alternative active sentences,
despite the fact that not all active sentences could be transformed into passive ones. Of
course, the syntactic transformations should satisfy certain semantic and pragmatic
constraints of passive sentences.
Formally, a prototypical passive sentence in Vietnamese could be identified and
differentiated from an active sentence via the following syntactic criteria: