The Syntactic Structures of the Chinese Bei Passive and the English Be-passive*

A significant word order difference between the English be-passive and the Chinese bei passive is that in English, the external argument occurs at the end of the sentence as in John was hit by Bill, while in Chinese, the external argument precedes the main verb as in (1). From the traditional view that took the agent phrase (byor bei-phrase) to be an adjunct, the word order difference simply follows as a special case of the difference in the location of adjuncts between these languages. However, the recent research has shown that the external argument actually stays in its base position, for both English (Collins 2005, Gehrke and Grillo 2009) and Chinese (Huang 2011, Huang & Liu 2011). Given the basic SVO word order for both languages, the difference in surface word order between their passives needs an explanation. Considering the word order of the English be passive, Collins (2005) offers a smuggling approach. Gehrke and Grillo (2009, G&G hereinafter) provide a similar VP movement approach with a different motivation for the movement. In this paper, I will argue that the Chinese bei passive does not have VP movement under either Collins’ or G&G’s account, and this explains the word-order difference. I also show how this difference arises the way it does between the two languages.