Grammatical Subject Research Articles

‘[The Irish] find much difficulty in these auxiliaries . . .puttingwillforshallwith the first person’: the decline of first-personshallin Ireland, 1760–1890

Among prescriptivists, the Irish have long had a reputation for not following the rule requiring a distinction betweenshallwith first-person andwillwith other grammatical subjects. Recent shift towardswillwith all persons in North American English – now also affecting British English – has been attributed to the influence of Irish immigrants. The present study of data from theCorpus of Irish English Correspondence(CORIECOR) finds that Irish English has not always preferredwill. Rather, the present-day situation emerged in Irish English between the late eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries. This important period covers the main language shift from Irish to English, and simplification in the acquisition process may account for the Irish English use ofwill.In eighteenth-century Irish English,shallpredominated. Comparison with other colonial Englishes of the period – US English (Kytö 1991) and Canadian English (Dollinger 2008) – and with north-west British English (Dollinger 2008) shows broadly similar cross-varietal distributions of first-personshallandwill. Irish English shifted rapidly towardswillby the 1880s, but was not unusual in this respect; a similar development took place at the same time in Canadian English, which may indicate a more general trend, at least in colonial Englishes. It is thus doubtful that Irish English influence drove the change towards first-personwill.We suggest the change might be associated with increasing literacy and accompanying colloquialisation (Mair 1997; Biber 2003; Leechet al.2009: 239ff.). As Rissanen (1999: 212) observes, and Dollinger corroborates for north-west British English,willpersisted in regional Englishes after the rise of first-personshallin the standard language. Increased use ofwillmight have been an outcome of wider literacy leading to more written texts, like letters, being produced by members of lower social strata, whose more nonstandard/vernacular usage was thus recorded in writing. There are currently few regional letter corpora for testing this hypothesis more widely. However, we suggest that, in nineteenth-century Ireland, increasing literacy may have helped spread first-personwillas a change from below. The shift to first-personwillthat is apparent in CORIECOR would then result from greater lower-class literacy, and this might be a key to understanding this change in other Englishes too.

Major Subject Honorification in Inalienable Possession Constructions

The subject honorification marker si-marked predicate must have an honorific subject in Spec-TP in order for the unchecked feature of the subject honorification marker si on T to be discharged in the Spec-head relation with the honorific subject. EPP raises the grammatical subject to Spec-TP, whereas the major subject (i.e., nominative possessor in multiple nominative constructions (MNCs, hereafter)) undergoes focus movement to Spec-FocP over TP. The honorific feature of the subject honorification marker si is classified into two kinds: One is discharged for the genuine subject and the other is discharged for the major subject. The nominative/topic-marked major subjects occupy Spec-FocP/CP, respectively. If in the inalienable possession construction, not the grammatical subject, but the major subject is honorific, the unchecked honorification feature of the marker si on T should percolate up to Foc/C in order to discharge its feature in the Spec-head relation with the honorific major subject in Spec-FocP/CP. As a result, this induces major subject honorification, which is what is at stake in this paper.

Discourse functions of grammatical subject in result and discussion sections of research article across four disciplines

This research analyzes the discourse functions of grammatical subjects used in results and discussion sections of research articles across four disciplines. To this end, sixteen results and discussion sections from four disciplines, namely, English Language Teaching, Economics, Biology and Civil Engineering (four from each discipline), were analyzed using the categorizations of discourse functions of grammatical subjects established by Gosden (1993). There were marked disciplinary differences in terms of the discourse functions served through the application of the grammatical subjects in the four sets of the results and discussion sections. These disciplinary differences were clearly shown in all the four domains of the discourse functions of the grammatical subject along with their subcategories. This result suggests that the discourse functions of the grammatical subject are strongly related to the public aims, norms and conventions of specific disciplines as well in the contexts in which it is realized.

Processing ser and estar to locate objects and events: An ERP study with L2 speakers of Spanish.

In Spanish locative constructions, a different form of the copula is selected in relation to the semantic properties of the grammatical subject: sentences that locate objects require estar while those that locate events require ser (both translated in English as 'to be'). In an ERP study, we examined whether second language (L2) speakers of Spanish are sensitive to the selectional restrictions that the different types of subjects impose on the choice of the two copulas. Twenty-four native speakers of Spanish and two groups of L2 Spanish speakers (24 beginners and 18 advanced speakers) were recruited to investigate the processing of 'object/event + estar/ser' permutations. Participants provided grammaticality judgments on correct (object + estar; event + ser) and incorrect (object + ser; event + estar) sentences while their brain activity was recorded. In line with previous studies (Leone-Fernández, Molinaro, Carreiras, & Barber, 2012; Sera, Gathje, & Pintado, 1999), the results of the grammaticality judgment for the native speakers showed that participants correctly accepted object + estar and event + ser constructions. In addition, while 'object + ser' constructions were considered grossly ungrammatical, 'event + estar' combinations were perceived as unacceptable to a lesser degree. For these same participants, ERP recording time-locked to the onset of the critical word 'en' showed a larger P600 for the ser predicates when the subject was an object than when it was an event (*La silla es en la cocina vs. La fiesta es en la cocina). This P600 effect is consistent with syntactic repair of the defining predicate when it does not fit with the adequate semantic properties of the subject. For estar predicates (La silla está en la cocina vs. *La fiesta está en la cocina), the findings showed a central-frontal negativity between 500-700 ms. Grammaticality judgment data for the L2 speakers of Spanish showed that beginners were significantly less accurate than native speakers in all conditions, while the advanced speakers only differed from the natives in the event+ser and event+estar conditions. For the ERPs, the beginning learners did not show any effects in the time-windows under analysis. The advanced speakers showed a pattern similar to that of native speakers: (1) a P600 response to 'object + ser' violation more central and frontally distributed, and (2) a central-frontal negativity between 500-700 ms for 'event + estar' violation. Findings for the advanced speakers suggest that behavioral methods commonly used to assess grammatical knowledge in the L2 may be underestimating what L2 speakers have actually learned.

Syntax and intentionality: An automatic link between language and theory-of-mind

Three studies provided evidence that syntax influences intentionality judgments. In Experiment 1, participants made either speeded or unspeeded intentionality judgments about ambiguously intentional subjects or objects. Participants were more likely to judge grammatical subjects as acting intentionally in the speeded relative to the reflective condition (thus showing an intentionality bias), but grammatical objects revealed the opposite pattern of results (thus showing an unintentionality bias). In Experiment 2, participants made an intentionality judgment about one of the two actors in a partially symmetric sentence (e.g., “John exchanged products with Susan”). The results revealed a tendency to treat the grammatical subject as acting more intentionally than the grammatical object. In Experiment 3 participants were encouraged to think about the events that such sentences typically refer to, and the tendency was significantly reduced. These results suggest a privileged relationship between language and central theory-of-mind concepts. More specifically, there may be two ways of determining intentionality judgments: (1) an automatic verbal bias to treat grammatical subjects (but not objects) as intentional (2) a deeper, more careful consideration of the events typically described by a sentence.

Pro-Nicene prosopology and the church in Augustine's preaching on John 3:13

AbstractJohn 3:13 presents a grammatical and theological problem for Augustine. If the only one who ascends to heaven is the one who descended, namely Christ, then what becomes of the Christian life of ascent? To unpack Augustine's solution to this problem, this article explores his use of John 3:13 in his anti-Donatist sermons of 406–7. Here Augustine uses the grammatical method of prosopological exegesis both to identify and to solve the problem of Christ's solo ascent. Prosopology asks of a text, ‘Who is speaking? To whom is he speaking? And about whom is he speaking?’ in order to parse the sometimes ambiguous personae within a dramatic scene. Through this method, Augustine affirms that Christ is indeed speaking about himself alone, but the reflexive subject of Christ includes the church who is his body. The Christian life of ascent to God requires that we become participants in the subject of Christ's ‘I’. Building on the work of ‘New Canon’ Augustine scholarship, I argue that this use of John 3:13 to espouse the unity of the church in the body of Christ is founded upon a pro-Nicene understanding of the revelatory and epistemological role of the Son. The ability of Christ fully to reveal the Father is a central tenet of Latin pro-Nicene refutations of homoian christologies, and this revelation of the Father's Word through Christ's incarnation is accomplished in our union with that Word through his body. Based on this pro-Nicene affirmation of epistemological salvation through Christ, Augustine then uses John 3:13 to condemn the Donatists for damning themselves by separating from the body of Christ. The oneness of the ecclesial body of Christ is predicated upon the oneness of Christ himself because it is into his complex subject that we are incorporated. Separation from that unity is separation from the singular grammatical subject who ascends as Christ to the Father. Thus, Augustine's grammatical practice of prosopological exegesis to solve the problem of John 3:13 connects the pro-Nicene affirmation of Christ's revelation of the Father to an anti-Donatist defence of the necessary unity of the church. This should encourage us to consider further the ways in which pro-Nicene principles help to shape Augustine's vision of the church.

The processing of it object relative clauses: Evidence against a fine-grained frequency account

Abstract Reali and Christiansen (2007a) found that pronominal object relative clauses were easier to process than analogous subject relative clauses, except when the pronoun is it. They attributed this to it occurring more frequently in subject relatives than in object relatives, while the opposite was true for the other pronouns. We find that their it relative clause processing result was due to a garden path like effect caused by participants misinterpreting the referent of the grammatical subject of the sentence containing the relative clause, rather than any inherent properties of the relative clause itself. We also find that when reduced object relative clauses are taken into account, it occurs more frequently in object relative clauses than subject relative clauses. Our results are broadly consistent with expectation-based accounts of processing, but not with a fine-grained account that would predict different behavior for reduced and unreduced object relative clauses.

Note on bare-passives in (selected) Bantu and Western Nilotic Languages

In the present paper, we concentrate on (selected) Bantu and Nilotic bare-passive strategies and lay out the basis for a typology of transitive passive constructions in these languages. We argue that bare-passives constitute an optimal strategy to change prominence relations between arguments, in languages that strongly hold to the default mapping between the highest thematic role available and the grammatical subject (i.e. Spec,TP). The Nilotic and Bantu languages discussed here differ in their way of satisfying this default mapping. In particular, impersonal bare-passives satisfy it by resorting to an agentive place-holder (an indefinite subject marker) and realizing the logical agent as a lower thematic/semantic role (e.g. instrument or locative). Left-dislocation and so called 'subjectobject' reversal bare-passives realize the default matching between agent and subject in a more straightforward way, but locate the patient in a higher argument position within the inflectional domain (Spec,TopP). As argued in Hamlaoui and Makasso (2013) and Hamlaoui (2013), and in line with Noonan (1977), the present languages display a clauseinternal split between subjecthood (being the grammatical subject in Spec,TP) and topicality (being the subject of the predication, in an inflectional-domain internal Spec,TopP).

Synchronic variation in the expression of French negation: A Distributed Morphology approach

ABSTRACTThis article discussesne-variation in French sentential negation based on the phonologically transcribed corpus T-zéro (cf. Meisner, in preparation) which allows a new interpretation of the facts. In the last decades, sociolinguistic and stylistic approaches to linguistic variation in French (cf. Armstrong, 2001) have shown that extra-linguistic factors, such as the speaker's age, sex, social background or geographic origin as well as the communication situation may have considerable influence on variablene-omission. However, in contrast to most sociolinguistic studies dedicated to this phenomenon (cf. Ashby, 1976, 1981, 2001; Armstrong and Smith, 2002; Coveney, 2002) we will focus on the linguistic factors influencingne-variation, since their importance is empirically evident but not yet fully exploited on a theoretical level.One leading assumption with respect tone-variation in literature is that the particleneis most frequently retained in combination with a proper name or a full DP and is commonly omitted when combined with clitic subjects. However, there are many exceptions to this rule which, as we argue, can be better explained by considering the phonological form of the involved subject.Ne-realisation is treated here as an inner-grammatical phenomenon that is triggered by context sensitivity with regard to the element to its left, i.e. usually the grammatical subject, and not as a consequence of ‘code-switching’ between two grammars nor as a sociolinguistic variable characterising certain groups of speakers in the Labovian sense (cf. Labov, 1972), since we seek to describe general variational tendencies, present in nearly all speakers of contemporary European French. Our analysis, which is implemented in a Distributed Morphology framework (Halle & Marantz, 1994), is compatible, however, with stylistic approaches tone-variation, such as audience design (cf. Bell, 1984, 2001).

Estableciendo el origen de la (in)visibilidad de las mujeres en dos traducciones de The Golden Notebook de Doris Lessing a las lenguas romance

In this paper the Spanish and Catalan translations of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook are compared to examine what translation practices have been used to assign grammatical gender to English personal nouns, pronouns and adjectives and to determine to what extent these practices are responsible for women’s (in)visibility in the target texts. The analysis of a self-collected corpus of comparative data revealed that three particular translation strategies result, to different extents, in gender-inclusive language (which is non-discriminatory, but which does not make women linguistically visible) in the two target texts. The three strategies are (i) the omission of grammatical subjects, (ii) the use of non-adjectival categories to translate adjectives and (iii) the pronominal substitution or omission of objects of verbs and prepositions. While subject omission is a locus of women’s invisibility in both target texts, adjective transformation and object pronominal substitution or omission are so in Spanish and Catalan respectively.

Comprehension of Marked Pronouns in Spanish and English: Object Anaphors Cross-Linguistically

Previous research on pronoun resolution has identified several individual factors that are deemed to be important for resolving reference. In this paper, we argue that of these factors, as tested here, plausibility is the most important, but interacts with form markedness and structural parallelism. We investigated how listeners resolved object pronouns that were ambiguous in the sense of having more than one possible antecedent. We manipulated the form of the anaphoric expression in terms of accentuation (English: Experiments 1a and 2a) and morphology (Spanish: Experiments 1b and 2b). We looked at sentences where both antecedents were equally plausible, or where only one of the antecedents was plausible. Listeners generally resolved toward the (parallel) grammatical object of the previous clause. When the pronouns were marked due to accentuation (English) or use of specific morphology (Spanish), preference switched to the alternative antecedent, the grammatical subject of the previous clause. In contrast, when one of the two antecedents was a much more plausible antecedent than the other, antecedent choice was almost wholly dictated by plausibility, although reference form prominence did significantly attenuate the strength of the preference.

A functional MRI study of a picture–sentence verification task

Mapping the meaning of a sentence onto visual entities is a fundamental process of daily language use, but it is unclear how attention in the visual context influences sentence comprehension. Aiming to examine this problem, we conducted a picture-sentence matching experiment with scanning using functional MRI. In the experiment, a moving picture describing an event with two colored objects was presented on a screen. A visual cue was flashed at the position of an object's appearance just before the event presentation, and participants were instructed to pay attention to the visually cued object in the picture. They were then required to read a simple Japanese sentence and to verify whether it correctly described the previous event. To examine the effects of visual cueing, we defined two conditions on the basis of the relationship between the visually cued object in an event and the grammatical subject of the subsequent sentence. When comparing the conditions in which the visually cued object was incongruent with the grammatical subject to the congruent conditions, participants showed a lower hit rate, and the right frontal eye field, which is known to be the region related to attention shift, was more activated. These findings suggest that the attention was initially allocated to an object encoded as the grammatical subject in the process of linking the content of a sentence with a visual event. Therefore, the attention was shifted from the cued object to the other object under the conditions discussed above.

FOR A NON-PREDICATIVE READING OF ESTI IN PARMENIDES, THE SOPHISTS AND PLATO

The absence of grammatical subject and object in Parmenides' "it is/it is not" allows the reading of the verbal forms not as copulas but as names, with no implicit subject nor elided predicate. Once there are two only alternatives, contrary and excluding each other, sustaining that a 'no-name' does not grant knowledge implies identifying its opposite – "it is" – as the only name conducive to knowledge in itself, denouncing the 'inconceivability of a knowledge that does not know. If "it is" is the only [name] "which can be thought/known", and "what is" is the way in which 'thought/knowledge' can be accomplished, there is no need to postulate the existence of 'anything' that is, nor of anything that can be said of "what is". Being the only name which "can be thought of/known", the unifying synthesis of "knowledge, knowing and known" in one infallible cognitive state, it is unthinkable that "what is" does not exist.

The case of the missing pronouns: Does mentally simulated perspective play a functional role in the comprehension of person?

Language comprehenders can mentally simulate perceptual and motor features of scenes they hear or read about (Barsalou, 1999; Glenberg & Kaschak, 2002; Zwaan, Stanfield, & Yaxley, 2002). Recent research shows that these simulations adopt a particular perspective (Borghi, Glenberg, & Kaschak, 2004; Brunyé, Ditman, Mahoney, Augustyn, & Taylor, 2009). Moreover, features of utterances influence the perspective that comprehenders are led to adopt. For instance, language about you primes a participant visual perspective, while third person he and she prime an observer perspective. But what role does perspectival mental simulation play in the comprehension of person? On the one hand, the different perspectives adopted during language understanding could be necessary for successfully determining the meaning of an utterance. However, current empirical evidence is also compatible with the possibility that adopting a perspective in mental simulation is not essential to comprehending who did what to whom. If the latter is the case, then we should be able to find cases where language comprehenders understand who did what to whom without measurably performing mental simulation from a particular perspective. A candidate language that might display such a case is Japanese, where grammatical subject pronouns can be omitted when the subject is inferable from context. We replicated a previously used method for assessing perspectival mental simulation during language comprehension, but tailored it to Japanese. The results showed that when pronouns were present, like in English, sentences facilitated identification of an image matching the proposed perspective associated with the mentioned pronoun. This replicated the previous finding for English. But when the subject pronoun was omitted, so that the sentence did not explicitly mention the subject, there was no such effect. Nonetheless, native comprehenders of Japanese automatically and easily tracked who the subjects of the sentences with omitted subjects were. Together, these findings suggest that while grammatical person modulates visual perspective in mental simulation, visual perspective is not necessary for successful identification and representation of event participants.

Sustaining Nothing: Untranslatable Material in Beckett's Worstward Ho

Sustaining Nothing: Untranslatable Material in Beckett's <i>Worstward Ho</i>

Topographies of Anticolonialism: The Ecopoetical Sublime in the Caucasus from Tolstoy to Mamakaev

Topographies of Anticolonialism: The Ecopoetical Sublime in the Caucasus from Tolstoy to Mamakaev

The Contrastive Analysis of the Structure Inside the Noun Phrase

The article deals with some principles that regulate the order of the elements inside the noun phrase that refers to the grammatical subject. The position of the words inside the noun phrase is variable by their grammatical and semantic functions in Lithuanian and fixed in English. The English and Lithuanian languages differ as to whether their syntactic organisation in the noun phrase reflects grammatical relations of a head noun with an article, with a noun, with an adjective, with a numeral, with a clause, etc. in a head-marked structure, or the noun phrase comprises terms or phraseological units bearing figurative sense. In the English noun phrase, the position of the dependent elements is before the head noun they modify or they are expressed by means of postposition. In Lithuanian the grammatical means of indicating grammatical relations in the noun phrase are endings and inflexional suffixes. Generally the flexibility of the word order within the noun phrase in Lithuanian is presented on the basis of morphological case marking. The dependent-marked structure of the determiners inside the noun phrase in English and Lithuanian sentences is a complex of interrelations between its elements. Thus, the semantic meaning of the sentence of the same content in the both languages can be expressed by the different order of its constituents although the order of the elements in the noun phrase can be different too. Generally this study is concerned with the noun phrase, i.e., the grammatical subject that occurs only before the main verb in a clause in English, though the position of the corresponding noun phrase translated into Lithuanian can appear before or after the main verb, or the clause may correspond to the word order with the retained object. The contrastive analysis of the noun phrase structure is based on the restrictive effects of grammatical and semantic meaning in reference to the syntactic interpretation. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.sal.0.21.3047

Multiple Case Marking and Null Argument Phenomena

This paper deals critically with An’s (2012) argument that the second clause (i.e. target clause) of a sentence is derived from the multiple case marking (MCM) construction via null pronominalization (i.e. pro) of the second nominative phrase with the optional introduction of a relevant discourse particle such as the topic marker-nun. This paper identifies the following by examining some empirical phenomena involved in this argument. First, though the genitive construction in the first clause allows MCM counterparts, the target clause does not always permit null pronominalization. Second, only when the genuine grammatical subject or object in the target clause is selected by its predicate, it can undergo null pronominalization. At this point, body-part or kinship expressions are a typical example which can be represented as pro. Third, the target clause may or may not be equivalent to the MCM counterpart when it involves pro. Finally, the genuine grammatical subject or object in question necessarily shows up as a null argument when the target clause involves null pronominalization, regardless of whether one or more genitive elements appear in the genitive construction in the antecedent clause.

Neurobiology of self-awareness in schizophrenia: An fMRI study

Self-awareness (SA) is one of the core domains of higher cortical functions and is frequently compromised in schizophrenia. Deficits in SA have been associated with functional and psychosocial impairment in this patient population. However, despite its clinical significance, only a few studies have examined the neural substrates of self-referential processing in schizophrenia. The aim of this study was to assess self-awareness in schizophrenia using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) paradigm designed to elicit judgments of self-reference in a simulated social context. While scanned, volunteers looked at visually-displayed sentences that had the volunteer's own first name (self-directed sentence-stimulus) or an unknown other person's first name (other-directed sentence stimulus) as the grammatical subject of the sentence. The volunteers were asked to discern whether each sentence-stimulus was about the volunteer personally (during a self-referential cue epoch) or asked whether each statement was about someone else (during an other-referential cue epoch). We predicted that individuals with schizophrenia would demonstrate altered functional activation to self- and other-directed sentence-stimuli as compared to controls. Fifteen controls and seventeen schizophrenia volunteers completed clinical assessments and SA fMRI task on a 3T Philips 3.0T Achieva system. The results showed significantly greater activation in schizophrenia compared to controls for cortical midline structures in response to self- vs. other-directed sentence-stimuli. These findings support results from earlier studies and demonstrate selective alteration in the activation of cortical midline structures associated with evaluations of self-reference in schizophrenia as compared to controls.

A Preliminary Investigation of the Adversity Reading in Archaic WEI Passives

Abstract: Problem statement: It is well-known that modern Chinese imposes such a requirement on the subject in the BEI passive, but in fact it does not hold tightly in Modern Chinese. Only 50-75% of passives have the adversity reading on the subject. Approach: One approach to explain this phenomenon is to adopt the view of grammaticalization and trace the semantic change of the morpheme BEI. However, the majority of the passive construction in archaic Chinese is not the BEI passive, but the WEI construction. The Adversity reading in the WEI construction in archaic Chinese is examined as a pilot study in this study. Results: Our research result shows that in the book of Shi Ji, among 50 tokens, 78% of the WEI passive has the adversity reading. Conclusion: This thus indicates that our impression about the adversity reading imposed on passives is not an absolute requirement, no matter in modern or archaic Chinese. On the other hand, the investigation of the WEI...SUO construction indicates that there is a decline of the adversity reading. We therefore conclude that a follow-up study should be carried out to complete the whole picture of the investigation of the adversity reading in Chinese passives.Key words: The BEI passive, the WEI (...SUO) passive, grammaticalization and language change(ProQuest: ... denotes formulae omitted.)INTRODUCTIONUnlike passives in English, it is widely assumed that most passives in Chinese impose an adversity reading on the grammatical subject (Hsin, 1990; Liu et al., 2001; Tseng, 2004), as articulated by the authors of a recent textbook for teachers of Chinese as a Second Language, modern Mandarin Chinese, BEI constructions are employed mostly when the subject suffers from some damage or feels unhappy. Therefore its usage is very limited (Liu et al., 2001, p.423) (the original excerpt from Liu et al. (2001) is as follows: Zai xiandai hanyu Putonghua li,'bei ziju muqian duo yongyu dui zhuyu laishuo shi shousun-de huo bu yukuai-de qingxing, suoyi ta-de shiyong shi bijiao youxian-de (p. 423)). Hence, examples like (1a) and (1b), with a beneficiary reading on the subject, are considered ungrammatical. In contrast, the example in (2), which has an adversity/malificiary reading, is allowed (However, as pointed out by Liu et al. (2001), if a verbal complement is added after the verb ai ('love') in (3b), this sentence becomes acceptable in Chinese).(i) Zhangsan bei ta-de xuesheng ai de yao-si. Zhangsan BEI his student love DE want-die 'Zhangsan was loved by his students.'Hence, it seems that the adding of the complement in BEI constructions may somehow cancel the requirement of the adversity reading on the subject. In the following discussion, the reader will see when examining BEI constructions, we consider both situations with and without the complement to avoid the controversy over this issue.... (1)b. *Zhangsan bei ta-de xuesheng ai. Zhangsan BEI his student love 'Zhangsan was loved by his students.'... (2)However, this requirement in fact is not fully carried out if one examines the modern Chinese passives in the corpus. For example, according to some recent corpus studies by McEnery et al. (2003); McEnery and Xiao (2005); Xiao et al. (2006); Yang (2006) and Kuo (2010), it has been noticed that the adversity requirement does not hold tightly in Modern Chinese. These studies show that only 50-75% of the BEI passive has the adversity reading on the subject.In the following discussion, we will first introduce the corpus works of Kuo (2010) and Peyraube (1989) which both address the issue of the adversity reading of the BEI passives. After that, we will point out that we may need to consider another historical factor when we examine the adversity reading change of the BEI passive. That is, in archaic Chinese, the BEI passive is not the only and major passive construction. We then investigate the WEI construction and conclude that in archaic Chinese, the WEI construction, as a major passive representative, also do not have a high percentage of adversity reading imposed on its subject. …