Permalink : http://hdl.handle.net/2115/52636

Comparative studies have been published on passive sentences in Chinese and Japanese and the conditions under which passive sentences are made have been discussed. This study demonstrates that the conditions in Chinese are related to the transitivity of events, which appears in "telic event", "realistic event" and "individual event". In contrast to that, the conditions of Japanese Passive are related to effectiveness on the speaker, which is to be discussed in my future article. In terms of modality, the passive in Chinese is assumed to be within the scope of proposition. On the contrast the Japanese passive suffix "rareru" carries the function of "modality", which will be discussed in the second part of this study.