A Corpus-based Study on the Usage of Passive Voice in English Political Speeches on the Guidance of Text Typology

Abstract

Due to cultural and other differences, English significantly differs from other languages in many ways, and the usage of passive voice is one of these differences. According to the theory of text typology proposed by Peter Newmark (1988), all texts can be divided into informative text, expressive text and appealing text. As we all know, political speech plays a vital role in English-speaking countries such as Britain and the United States. Therefore, this thesis, based on previous studies, gives special attention to the usage of passive voice in different types of texts, especially in political speeches under the guidance of text typology, and further finds that the proportion of passive voice adopted in political speeches ranges from 2% to 20% and averagely accounts for 10% of the text, and most passive sentences in political speeches are used to state facts and emphasize opinions with American inaugural addresses from 1961 to 2021 as self-built corpus and quantitative analysis as its method. It is hoped that this study can provide some references for translators who are engaged in political speech translations.