Contrasting Vietnamese passive voice and English passive voice

Abstract

This paper tries to clarify some ambiguity in the literature about what a passive is and what constitutes a passive in Vietnamese and English. However, there is no clear agreement among these scholars on how to identify these types of passive buildings. In Vietnamese, there are various perspectives on passive sentences. Some experts suggest that while the Vietnamese language lacks a passive voice as a morphological category, it does have passive sentences as syntactic structures. The purpose of this paper is to compare Vietnamese passive structures to English passive voice. This is accomplished by delving into what has been identified as a passive in Vietnamese, namely phrases containing the morphemes “bị” and “được. This is compared to the English passive voice counterpart.