A Contrastive Study of the Passive Voice in
Journal Articles in Theoretical and Applied
Linguistics

Lu Lu

doi:10.1515/cjal-2013-0031

Article

A Contrastive Study of the Passive Voice in Journal Articles in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics

Lu Lu

Published/Copyright: October 23, 2013

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From the journal Chinese Journal of Applied Linguistics Volume 36 Issue 4

Abstract

The passive voice is an important construction for packaging information. Many textbooks, style manuals or academic papers, however, offer different or even contradictory advice on the use of passives. Previous findings show that passives exhibit disciplinary variation, thus special treatment should be given to different disciplines. However, even within the same discipline, such as linguistics, there are different types of academic writing, namely theoretical articles versus empirical ones. To test whether a difference in the use of passives exists between these two sub-disciplines, the passives in articles sampled from Language and Applied Linguistics are counted and compared. The results show that applied linguistics articles demonstrate a significantly higher (Sig. = .000, p < .001) occurrence of passives than theoretical ones.

Keywords: passives; theoretical linguistics; applied linguistics; corpus

Published Online: 2013-10-23

Published in Print: 2013-10-22

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Articles in the same Issue

https://doi.org/10.1515/cjal-2013-0031

Keywords for this article

passives; theoretical linguistics; applied linguistics; corpus